System iNetwork

IBM's Dan Kolz, who works on policy-based security issues in Rochester, says Secure Perspective is innovative because it's designed to let business managers define security policies. It's as simple as creating statements like, "Accountants can update accounting data," he notes, which would then be mapped to underlying System i object security rules.

As far as Kolz knows, IBM is the first to have produced a natural language parsing security tool of this nature. John Earl, PowerTech's chief technology officer, who is familiar with Secure Perspective, agrees.

PowerTech, by the way, doesn't see Secure Perspective as a competitor to the company's own tools or services and has used the tool with its clients already.

"Policy is the missing link in security," Earl says. Particularly when it comes to auditors and regulatory compliance, Secure Perspective is handy because it helps a company define a policy. "Compliance is really the act of measuring against a policy," Earl explains.

Turning Security Over to Your Business

"Systems administrators have been determining policy, and you really want to make that a business decision," Earl says. Some System i pros may have a hard time relinquishing detailed control, Earl notes, but he believes that administrators can better spend their time on the technical aspects rather than figuring out who should have access to what.

In Secure Perspective, after you create and select your natural language rules, the tool will generate a list of possible problems. For example, by providing access to one type of accounting data, you could inadvertently remove access to another kind of data — depending on your definitions and environment. If you make a mistake, Secure Perspective also lets you quickly revert to the previous settings.

For more detail, check out http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/security/.

IBM says it will likely end up rolling out an enterprise-wide solution based on Secure Perspective for System i but capable of working across a variety of platforms and data stores.