IBM i Compliance and Security: Identifying the Events That Matter Most

IBM i Compliance and Security – Assure Security and SIEM Integration 

Monitoring of Compliance

IBM i systems process massive volumes of critical and sensitive information for enterprises across industries. These organizations are governed by stringent cybersecurity regulations that protect consumers, such as SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, state privacy regulations, and more. To maintain compliance and reduce the risk of data breaches and security incidents, all operations on an organization’s IBM i systems must be continuously monitored.

While IBM i journals and log files are comprehensive, they’re also cryptic and voluminous. If information is needed for an audit or analysis, it’s nearly impossible to extract it in a timely fashion. Without proper logging and a way to quickly obtain insights or create reports regarding changes to critical databases, enterprises risk failing regulatory audits.

To demonstrate compliance, IT teams need logs and information about a variety of dynamic elements, including:

• Changes to system objects (system values, profiles, creation or deletion of users, authorization lists)
• Sign in and access attempts
• Any action involving sensitive data
• Access to critical databases
• Authentication failures
• Changes to passwords and access rights
• Data transmission and movement
• Powerful user activity, including the commands issued

Monitoring for Security

IBM i systems contain sensitive information that can be extremely valuable and must be protected. Monitoring IBM i system and database changes is critical to preventing, or limiting the damage from, staff seeking to use your data for personal gain and malicious actors from the outside.

The problem is, you won’t notice a security incident occurring on your system unless you are reviewing the logs of system and database activity for anomalies, policy violations, and patterns. Without monitoring system activity, you have no way to observe unauthorized activity happening on your IBM i systems, you have no visibility into who’s changing what, and no way to head off potential data breaches.

To see this information, IT has to pull data from an operating system’s many log sources such as the system audit journal and database journals, plus the history log and system operator message queue. Doing this manually takes more time than IT staff has to spare.

Download this eBook to learn how Assure Monitoring and Reporting provides powerful query capabilities that automate analysis of IBM i journals, history files, and message queues to product actionable alerts and clear concise, easy-to-read reports on system activity, database changes, and static sources of information on your IBM i.