CA VM:Secure vs IBM Security zSecure comparison

CA VM:Secure for z/VM (CA VM:Secure) is a comprehensive security and directory management system for z/VM.

It’s designed to help you minimize risk by establishing rigid safeguards and controlling access to z/VM and Linux on System z guest resources.

CA VM:Secure helps prevent inadvertent security exposures by automatically maintaining synchronization between the z/VM user directory and your security rules. It helps make it easier to enforce IT-wide security practices automatically, identify security offenders and produce complete security reports and audit listings.

CA VM:Secure help you optimize your z/VM environment by providing:

• Control over access to all system resources
• Delegation of disk space management and automated direct access storage device (DASD) relocation

CA VM:Secure Features

CA VM:Secure offers the following features:

• Comprehensive Security Management: CA VM:Secure provides a comprehensive suite of security management features to protect IBM z/OS mainframe systems, addressing various aspects of security such as access control, authentication, encryption, and threat detection.

• Granular Access Control: The solution allows administrators to define fine-grained access controls based on user roles and privileges, ensuring that only authorized users have access to specific resources and operations.

• Strong User Authentication: CA VM:Secure supports multiple authentication methods, including password-based authentication, digital certificates, and multi-factor authentication, providing flexibility in choosing the appropriate level of user authentication.

• Audit and Compliance Support: The solution offers robust auditing capabilities, enabling organizations to monitor user activity, track system events, and generate detailed audit reports. This helps in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and facilitates internal auditing.

• Data Protection: Users are offered encryption mechanisms to protect sensitive data at rest and during transmission, safeguarding valuable information from unauthorized access and ensuring data confidentiality and integrity.

• Centralized Security Administration: The solution provides a centralized interface for managing security policies, user accounts, and system configurations. This streamlines administrative tasks, simplifies security management, and improves overall efficiency.

• Intrusion Detection and Prevention: It includes built-in mechanisms for detecting and preventing security threats and unauthorized access attempts. This proactive defense helps in safeguarding the mainframe environment from potential attacks.

• User Provisioning and De-Provisioning Automation: The solution offers automated workflows for user provisioning and de-provisioning, reducing manual effort and ensuring timely and accurate management of user accounts.

• Secure File Transfer: CA VM:Secure supports secure file transfer capabilities between z/OS systems and other platforms, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data during transmission.

• Integration with Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solutions: Users can benefit from its integration capabilities with external IAM solutions, allowing them to leverage existing identity management systems and establish centralized control over user identities and access.

• Customizable Reporting: CA VM:Secure offers customizable reports and dashboards, enabling organizations to generate tailored reports that provide insights into security events, user activity, and compliance status.

  
  

IBM Security zSecure V2.1.1 suite consists of multiple individual products designed to help you administer your mainframe security, monitor for threats, enforce policy compliance, audit usage and configurations, and assist in compliance management and audit reporting.

IBM Security zSecure Admin, IBM Security zSecure Visual, and IBM Security zSecure CICS Toolkit together provide administrative, provisioning, and management components that can significantly reduce administration time, effort, and costs, and help improve productivity and response time, as well as help reduce training time for new administrators.

IBM Security zSecure Audit, IBM Security zSecure Alert, and IBM Security zSecure Command Verifier together provide security policy enforcement, audit, monitoring, and compliance management capability. These offerings help ease the burden of compliance audits, help reduce the time and costs of performing compliance and monitoring, can improve security and incident handling, and can increase overall operational effectiveness.

IBM Security zSecure Adapters for QRadar SIEM V2.1.1, new to the suite, collects, formats, and sends enriched mainframe System Management Facility (SMF) audit records to IBM Security QRadar SIEM to be included in the enterprise-wide integrated security information and event management (SIEM), log management, anomaly detection, incident forensics, and configuration and vulnerability management.

IBM Security zSecure Features

IBM Security zSecure offers the following features:

• Centralized Security Administration: IBM Security zSecure allows users to centrally manage and administer mainframe security configurations, user accounts, and access controls across multiple systems, simplifying the complex task of security administration and ensuring consistent security policies.

• Auditing and Compliance Monitoring: The suite provides comprehensive auditing and compliance monitoring capabilities, capturing and analyzing security events, generating detailed audit trails. It assists organizations in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and internal security policies.

• Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: Users can leverage real-time monitoring and alerting features to proactively detect and respond to security incidents or suspicious activities on the mainframe, enabling timely incident response and reducing the impact of potential threats.

• Security Event Visualization: With its graphical user interface, IBM Security zSecure offers convenient representations of security events, system settings, and more. The solution provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface for easier analysis, reporting, and visualization of security-related information.

• Command Verification and Policy Enforcement: IBM Security zSecure's Command Verifier automatically validates and audits system commands issued by privileged users, helping enforce security policies and reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorized changes.

• Compliance Reporting: Users can generate detailed compliance reports using IBM Security zSecure to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements, industry standards, and internal security policies.

• Integration with SIEM Solutions: IBM Security zSecure integrates seamlessly with Security Information and Event Management solutions, allowing for the correlation and analysis of mainframe security events alongside events from other enterprise systems.

• User Behavior Analytics: IBM Security zSecure incorporates advanced analytics capabilities to detect anomalies in user behavior, helping identify potential security threats or insider risks through behavior profiling and anomaly detection algorithms.

• Secure Configuration Assessment: The solution enables users to assess and validate the security configurations of mainframe systems, ensuring compliance with best practices and industry standards while identifying and addressing potential security weaknesses or vulnerabilities.

• Secure File Transfer: IBM Security zSecure facilitates secure file transfers between mainframe systems and external entities, employing encryption and secure protocols to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data during transit.

• Mainframe Vulnerability Assessment: Users of the solution can conduct vulnerability assessments of mainframe systems using IBM Security zSecure, identifying and remediating potential security weaknesses and vulnerabilities to maintain a robust security posture.

• Mainframe Forensics: IBM Security zSecure provides capabilities for mainframe forensics, enabling detailed analysis and investigation of security incidents and unauthorized activities, aiding in incident response, and supporting post-incident forensic investigations.

IBM Security zSecure Benefits

Users of IBM Security zSecure will experience the following benefits:

• Simplified security administration

• Improved access control management

• Comprehensive auditing and compliance monitoring

• Real-time monitoring and alerting

• Seamless integration with SIEM solutions

• Advanced user behavior analytics

• Integration with Identity and Access Management systems

• Role-based access control (RBAC)

• Mainframe vulnerability assessment