Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Dynamic Systems Solutions last week announced a new version of its OS/400 auditing tool that keeps tabs on any changes, additions, or deletions made at the member level. Previous releases of Auditron400 only monitored down to the file level, which left malicious or careless users with the ability to make changes that escaped detection by the auditing tool. Auditron400 Version 3 also features a new offline capability designed to save precious disk space on production OS/400 servers.

With new laws, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPPA, and FDA 21 CFR Part 11, making poor data security a criminal act, it's more important than ever to maintain a comprehensive view of data and to protect it from tampering. For companies housing their valuable customer and production data on iSeries and AS/400 servers, several software vendors, including Dynamic Systems Solutions, provide auditing tools to detect and track changes made to the DB2/400 database.

Auditron400 basically allows users to take "before" and "after" images of their data. The program generates audit logs that show which data has been added, changed, or deleted. These logs provide an additional level of detail about the changed data, including the program and user that made the modification and the exact time and date of the modification.

With Auditron400 Version 3.0, Dynamic Systems Solutions addressed what it described as a potential gap in the product's data-analysis capabilities. The issue has to do with files containing multiple members and what happens when one of those members is deleted or renamed. While most applications today do not use more than one member per file, some new applications are using this technique, and Dynamic Systems Solutions wanted to remain ahead of the curve, says the company's vice president, Rob Kirkwood.

In previous releases, Auditron400 was unable to detect the deletion of a member if more than one member resided inside a file, Kirkwood says. "Although we kept track of member changes inside the table, if they decided to whack the entire member, we'd miss that," he says. The enhancement was requested by one Auditron400 user, and DSS decided to address the issue with a new version of the software.

The other major feature delivered with Auditron400 Version 3.0 is a new offline reporting capability. With this release, users are now able to move their Auditron400 reports to a separate OS/400 server. Previous releases required users to store their audit logs on the same machine where the analysis was performed. This did not pose any storage problems with customers analyzing relatively small databases--with, say, a few thousand customer records. But for users with a million customer records, the Auditron400 logs could grow as large as 7 GB, Kirkwood says, contributing to disk space problems.

Auditron400 Version 3 is available now. Licenses for the software are available for a flat fee of $17,500, regardless of the size of your OS/400 server. Annual maintenance is 15 percent.

In other Dynamic Systems Solutions news, the Pompano Beach, Florida, company recently hired industry veteran Elias El-Tannouri to head up the firm's J.D. Edwards consulting services division. El-Tannouri was a manager at the leading OS/400 ERP vendor from 1995 to 2001. He arrives at Dynamic Systems Solutions from Decision Technologies, a Fremont, California, consulting firm that specializes in JDE implementations, where he was a client program director. Before that, El-Tannouri held positions at 180Commerce and eConnections.