It has been a busy year, and it’s hard to believe we are well into February already. I have really been enjoying the recent interaction with class students, regional user groups, and PowerTech customers around the country and although it is one of my favorite responsibilities, it is not without its challenges. While I have a Blackberry pretty much velcro’d to my hand, it can be challenging to keep up on the daily affairs of the office in Minneapolis.

I actually hear that type of complaint from a lot from customers that I talk to: The daily challenge of finding the time to perform all of the necessary security forensics. It is always nice to visit with some of those same customers after they have installed a tool like PowerTech Compliance Monitor (CM), and to hear how the tasks that previously took hours or even days to perform, can now be reviewed and analyzed in a matter of minutes. For example, the task of comparing system values against your policy. Printing and hand-reviewing this information is not difficult, but takes a good eye and patience to do the compare. Compare that with CM’s ability to quickly and effortlessly print system value scorecards that color-code any non-compliant items for you, and provide a compliance ranking. Of course, although we ship a great policy template inside the product, you can modify it for your own requirements. Now, consider comparing the values on dozens or even hundreds of partitions and it doesn’t take long to see where the time savings start to really add up!

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act (HR 4061). The bill passed easily with a vote of 422-5, and now goes before Congress. If passed into law, the bill provides various provisions, such as providing grants to students in the field of computer security in return for service to the government cybersecurity team, strengthening the role of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to influence the way cybersecurity is addressed though awareness campaigns, and requiring the President to perform an agency-by-agency assessment of the skills found in government’s cybersecurity workforce. It is the first major cybersecurity bill to be passed by either house in the current session of Congress, but is unlikely to be the last. For more information, visit http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h4061/show

On another note, the PowerTech team is busy working on the finishing touches to Network Security v6.0, which is to be released soon. We are already actively working on ideas for several other product releases, as well as building a development wish list for NS v7.0. As an IBM business partner, we are now running tests on pre-release versions of IBM i to ensure that our products are approved and ready to go when IBM releases its latest iteration of the operating system. I will be taking a look at the new release soon with an eye on delivering an update regarding any new security enhancements that have been included.

If you are in Rochester, Minnesota today for the Large User Group (LUG) sessions at IBM, please consider yourself invited to our customer appreciation event at the DoubleTree hotel downtown.

As I am writing this, the snow is again falling and blowing. If you are in a geography that is being blasted by this storm, or even the last one that came through that ended up dropping a whopping 33” of snow on our nation’s capitol, stay safe. Next week I am headed to Nashville, and then on to Buffalo, so I have a feeling that I haven’t seen the last of Mother Nature! I am hosting an IBM i security workshop in both cities, and presenting at the local user groups. If you would like to get more information on these events, check the events section of the Web site at www.powertech.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Other, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.