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SkyView Partners Building New iSeries Security Practice
by Alex Woodie
There was a new vendor on the floor of the COMMON expo last week in Nashville. SkyView Partners is less than one month old, but its two
principals, Carol Woodbury and John Vanderwall, are well known in the iSeries and AS/400 community.
Both are former executives of PowerTech Group,
one of the leading vendors in the iSeries security field. SkyView is based out of Seattle, Washington. The
new firm is focused on OS/400 security consulting.
According to Vanderwall, SkyView's chief operating officer, there is considerable demand for iSeries
security consulting. At the IBM PartnerWorld convention
in February, IBM reported security consulting would grow at a 30 percent rate this year, he said. That will
provide plenty of work for IBM Global Services this year, and because Global Services won't even consider
accounts with potential billing of less than about $150,000, that leaves plenty of fertile ground for a
security consulting startup, he said.
You might be asking yourself, "What is security consulting, and why do I need it?" Security consulting is a
service provided to help secure a company's server, its operating system, and the applications that use the
operating system, from threats inside and outside of the firewall. A security consultant such as SkyView
assesses a company's security architecture and, if necessary, designs a new one. Additional services might
include training, seminars, support, and recommending security tools--services that SkyView is prepared to
offer right now.
In a perfect world, AS/400 and iSeries users would be able to properly implement security practices on
their own, without requiring a specialist such as SkyView. After all, OS/400 is one of the most secure
operating systems in use today, and there is a plethora of aftermarket security tools to help OS/400 users
ratchet down built-in security.
So why can't users do OS/400 security themselves?
The problem with OS/400 security and the aftermarket security tools is that users don't have enough time to
use them, and they can be too complex and difficult to use for the average user, says Woodbury, who
should know: She designed OS/400 security at IBM's Rochester, Minnesota, labs, where she held the title
of OS/400 security architect for 10 years.
"The reality is that people lack the expertise and the time" to properly implement security, said Woodbury,
SkyView's president and chief executive. Vanderwall agrees. "Security is a total after thought," he says.
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