Safestone Updates Cross-Platform Compliance Tool

May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

Safestone Technologies recently added support for Linux with its Compliance Center for IBM Power Systems. The audit and compliance reporting tool now works across all three Power Systems operating systems: IBM i, AIX, and Linux.

Safestone originally launched its Compliance Center software for IBM i back in 2010. The software takes the grunt work out of sifting through server logs and configuration settings, gathering the pertinent data, stripping out the unimportant stuff, and arranging it into an acceptable report format to hand to your auditor to prove compliance with a range of industry regulations.

The U.K. security software company followed that up by announcing support for AIX with the product in 2010. Now that the company supports the two dominant Linux distributions on the Power Systems platforms–Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell ‘s SUSE Enterprise Linux–the company can support compliance activities on the Power Systems platform, no matter what OS is running.

Safestone product manager Simon Bott says the decision to support AIX and Linux was driven by customer feedback and IBM‘s strategic direction. “We are increasingly coming across customers running a combination of IBM i, AIX, and Linux,” he says. “These customers were telling us they wanted a cost-effective solution, which simplified reporting across their core IBM operating systems.”

Prior to Safestone’s cross-platform solution, customers running all three Power Systems OSes had two poor options when it came to regulatory compliance reporting across IBM i, AIX, and Linux, Bott says. “Either use a mixture of in-house written scripts and programs which invariably failed to satisfy auditors, were unreliable, and require technical expertise to use,” he says, “or purchase and deploy an expensive and complicated enterprise compliance solution that encompassed far more than just the IBM Power Systems server environment.”