Empowering Security and Compliance Management for the z/OS RACF Environment using IBM Tivoli Security Management for z/OS

Book excerpt: Every organization has a core set of mission-critical data that requires protection. Security lapses and failures are not simply disruptions, they can be catastrophic events with consequences felt across the enterprise. The inadvertent mistakes of privileged users alone can result in millions of dollars in damages through unintentional configuration errors and careless security commands. Malicious users with authorized access can cause even greater damage. As a result, security management faces a serious challenge to adequately protect a company's sensitive data. Likewise, IT staff is challenged to provide detailed audit and controls documentation in the face of increasing demands on their time. Automation and simplification of security and compliance processes can help you meet these challenges and establish effective, sustainable user administration and audit solutions. This includes security database cleanup, repeatable audit of configurations and settings, and active monitoring of changes and events. IBM Tivoli Security Management for z/OS V1.11 provides these solutions to help enhance the security of mainframe systems through automated audit and administration. In this IBM® RedpaperTM document we discuss how Tivoli® Security Management for z/OS® allows you to submit mainframe security information from z/OS, RACF®, and DB2® into an enterprise audit and compliance solution and how to combine mainframe data from z/OS, RACF, and DB2 with that from other operating systems, applications, and databases in order to provide the ability to capture comprehensive log data, interpret that data through sophisticated log analysis, and communicate results in an efficient, streamlined manner for full enterprise-wide audit and compliance reporting.