SPI, the sole Sub-Saharan distributor for Open Systems Management Ltd (OSM), today announced the general availability of the latter's v4.0 of the Operations Workflow Scheduling and Privileged User Management package for users of Unix, Linux and Microsoft Windows systems, COSduty-SSA (SSA, Secure Shell Auditing).
This release is a significant update to the previous v3.1 and adds both refinement and strength to several functional areas as well as extending the product's scope.
Data centres in many organisations have been hard at work in recent times working to strengthen internal access controls and monitoring procedures so as to regulate the actions of operations and system administration staff. In the absence of management software, they often have to work as privileged users ('root' on Unix or Linux systems, 'administrator' on Windows) with the result that they have unrestricted, unmonitored access to all parts of their systems.
However trustworthy they may be, such access prevents data centre management from being able to assure the integrity of application data and therefore unable to make the necessary guarantees to satisfy auditors for compliance purposes.
COSduty-SSA operates in two distinct, yet related, functional areas:
* Control and management of the procedures and workflow performed by data centre operators.
* Management and monitoring of administrators when working as privileged users.
In the first mode, COSduty-SSA facilitates the capture of operations' procedures, some of which may require privileged access, and to delegate them via a graphical user interface (GUI) to operators, subject to access control and activity logging. Procedures may acquire system privileges to run, but the user launching them does not need to possess privileges personally.
COSduty-SSA is used in the second (SSA, Secure Shell Auditing) mode on those occasions when a system administrator cannot avoid logging in with super-user privileges. Administrators must request a privileged session on the designated system at a particular time and are then granted access, or otherwise, to the appropriate and limited sub-set of commands needed to perform the required task. All keystrokes are recorded for future possible audit and analysis.
Among the many new and updated features in COSduty-SSA v4, the following are significant:
* Duties may be written to request data items to be entered at run-time.
* The product may be configured to use OSM's COSbatch job scheduler to manage automatic duties.
* Duties may be assigned to named individual users in addition to user roles.
* Duties may be switched from running in the foreground to the background and subsequently stopped.
* A single duty may be targeted to run on a group of hosts rather than just one.
* Administrators authorised to use SSA may be members of more than one access group.
* A new facility to terminate SSA sessions that have remained idle for a specified time.
* Password management and secure storage facility (sometimes known as a 'password vault').
* RDP-enabled secure administration of Windows servers.
"We are very pleased with this latest release of COSduty-SSA which, by combining management of both IT operations and administration, appears to be unique in the market," commented Leslie Jackson, MD and CEO of OSM. "Customers buy the product to meet their needs in respect of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other similar legislation, then find that it delivers an unexpected ROI even when compliance benefits are removed from the arithmetic."
For further information, please contact Chris Anderson at telephone +27 11 234 1560; fax +27 11 234 1387; e-mail chris@spi.co.za.
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Open Systems Management (OSM) - a privately held company, founded in 1988 and based out of Ascot, UK and Seattle, WA, USA, develops and markets operations, security, identity and systems management applications for users of Unix, Linux and Microsoft Windows systems. OSM is backed by 3i, one of Europe's largest venture capital investors. Notable customers include West Corporation, Duke Energy, Lloyds TSB Bank, St Jude Medical and Northumbrian Water.
SPI
SPI is a company that provides utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry. It is the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for US-based FacetCorp, US-based Innovative Routines, UK-based-Open Systems Management, US-based Optio Software and UK-based Xi Software. SPI is also the sales agent for UK-based Metron and develops some of its own software utilities to complement the overseas products that it distributes.
SPI has a wide and varied customer base, including organisations such as Aspen Pharmacare, Johannesburg Municipality, Johannesburg University, Metropolitan Health Group, Nampak, National Brands, Stellenbosch University, UCT and Unisa.
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