Guardium Stands Tall Over DB2 on i Data

October 21, 2015 Alex Woodie

You may have tough security policies and follow IBM i security recommendations to the letter. But if you’re in a regulated industry, that’s not good enough–you need to actually prove you’re doing things right, and that means auditing. IBM i shops that face these requirements may want to check out the latest release of IBM‘s Security Guardium software, which includes new capabilities for IBM i.

Buried in IBM’s October 5 announcement for IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 11 and IBM i 7.2 TR3 were several snippets about Guardium and IBM i’s relationship to it. The new TRs mesh with the new features IBM delivered with Guardium 10, which shipped on August 28.

“Do you know what’s going on on your system,” asked IBM i product manager Tim Rowe in the October 5 webcast announcing the TRs. “Do you need to have an audit trail? We know we have security folks who work on a machine and they’re people who we truly trust. But when it comes to security compliance, you need to have audit capabilities. You need to have proof that even the trusted folks are doing the right things.

“That’s where Guardium comes into play,” he added. “Guardium has a number of cool updates that were added to version 10.”

Guardium got its own slide in the October 5 TR webcast.

For starters, the Guardium Vulnerability Assessment (VA) component in version 10 now works with IBM i. IBM i shops can now use the VA tool to scan their databases to detect vulnerabilities, such as missing security and HIPER PTFs, weak passwords, unauthorized changes, misconfigured privileges, and other vulnerabilities. It will also recommend changes if it detects problems.

In addition to DB2 for i, the VA features in Guardium 10 added support for analytical databases Teradata AsterDB and SAP HANA and the NoSQL database from Mongo DB.

The Guardium Database Activity Monitor (DAM) tool has been enhanced to work more effectively with IBM i and its integrated DB2 database, IBM says. This includes improvements to audit server filtering and the new capability to use equal and not-equal operators. Administrators can also set up DAM to scan against multiple policies, enabling it to “capture complete activity details without excess auditing noise,” IBM says in the announcement.

This release also gains enterprise high-availability features like fail-over over and load balancing, Rowe says. “Guardium has been supported on IBM i for a while now,” he continued. “We continue to work with them very closely to help drive the requirements for security for DB2 for i … up to the product so this works . . . as well with the other DB2 families as it does for IBM i.”

IBM also changed the name of the product with this release, which shouldn’t surprise anybody. The old name was IBM InfoSphere Guardium, while the new name is IBM Security Guardium. For more info, see IBM’s October 5 TR announcement letter or IBM’s August 25 Guardium v10 announcement letter.

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