CA takes mainframe security to next level with five upgrades for IBM z/OS

New Versions Optimize Data Protection and Help Ensure Measurable Compliance

ISLANDIA, N.Y.– CA (NYSE: CA) today announced new versions of five solutions for IBM z/OS that strengthen and automate the protection of corporate IT resources, while helping to ensure legal and regulatory compliance.

Corporate IT organizations must rigorously authenticate user access to applications and resources to protect critical and constantly growing volumes of data. They also must comply with increasingly stringent regulations—without adding headcount or diverting limited IT resources from other critical tasks.

The new versions meet this challenge by providing enhanced security analysis, compliance, reporting and data protection functionality and by streamlining administrative and management tasks.

“The escalating value of our data and growing compliance pressures are forcing us to implement increasingly rigorous security policies,” said Linda Rutland, associate director, Risk & Compliance Assessment of TSYS, one of the world’s largest payment-services companies. “CA’s enhanced security solutions for z/OS will enable us to implement, enforce, and manage these policies more effectively over time even as we continue to control our mainframe staff headcount.”

The new versions include:

CA ACF2 and CA Top Secret r12 for z/OS, which provide access control for z/OS operating systems-including externalized security controls for CICS, UNIX System Services and IMS-as well as options for centralized DB2 security. A new Compliance Information Analysis feature enables complete analysis and reporting of user entitlements, groupings, and administrative privileges. CA ACF2 and CA Top Secret also exploit a variety of new z/OS 1.9 features.

CA Auditor r12 for z/OS, which provides comprehensive auditing, integrity check, and verification capabilities, and simplifies and automates routine auditing tasks that are often performed manually. It helps auditors achieve compliance and determine risk by adding FIPS-200-compliant baseline analysis functions and analysis support for z/OS UNIX System Services, and by providing in-depth auditing information about the external security manager: CA ACF2, CA Top Secret or IBM RACF.

CA Cleanup r12, which addresses information security, protection and privacy regulations by eliminating outdated access rights. New reporting features track specific compliance and security activities and enable the use of CA Cleanup data in support of entitlement re-certification, as recommended by ISO 270001 2005 A.11.2.4.

CA Tape Encryption r12.5, which simplifies and automates the management of cryptography processes that safeguard critical data stored on z/OS managed tapes, reducing the potential for breach remediation and fines. The new version supports tape selection based on external security manager criteria for enhanced control and flexibility in protecting data.

“The new security features in CA Tape Encryption have given us ultimate control and implementation simplicity for protecting our critical data without having to learn or parse a new language or construct,” said Mark Depathy, senior infrastructure engineer at Peoples Bank. “CA continues to deliver on its vision to meet compliance requirements for security and data access with solutions that are easy to use, offer robust functionality, and provide full support for the latest IBM platform features, like zIIP performance.”

CA’s mainframe security solutions integrate with the company’s offerings for distributed platforms—enabling administrators to manage identities and access and perform auditing and reporting comprehensively across their heterogeneous enterprise computing environments. This unified approach to IT security mitigates risk while reducing technology ownership costs caused by security silos.

“As customers push a wider range of application workloads onto their IBM mainframes, it has become essential to perform more sophisticated data protection practices within existing staffing constraints,” said Guy Harrison, senior vice president at CA. “With these new releases, CA is enabling them to do exactly that.”