Mainframe Visibility
.

100% Visibility into All Mainframe Database Activity—Without Impact

Tracking the details of who is accessing data and what is done with the data is now required for compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).  Guardium for Mainframes is the only database auditing solution that provides 100% visibility into mainframe database activity without impacting business processes.

Current solutions for mainframe databases have been limited to logging utilities such as trace or transactions logs, which fail to capture all of the critical activity.  Trace utilities can severely impact performance, and logging utilities capture less data than is legally required.  For example, they do not capture read operations on sensitive data and are not real-time, leaving your business exposed.

The same limitations apply with mainframe log management tools.  These tools do not natively monitor any database activity on their own and instead rely on information from internal DBMS log utilities.

Guardium for Mainframes provides 100% visibility into all database activity in real-time, with minimal performance overhead.  This allows you to easily identify access to sensitive data and unauthorized changes by privileged users.

Guardium for Mainframes detects and immediately reports anomalous behavior and activities that violate corporate policies, generating policy-based actions such as security alerts.  The system provides the data protection you need and enables you to meet regulatory requirements—without sacrificing performance and availability.

Key Features

  • Captures all critical operations, including activity from:
    • SELECTS, DML and DDL
    • DB2 utilities
    • Access grants and revokes
  • Uses zIIP specialty processors, reducing general CPU usage
  • Monitors and audits all activity for privileged users, mainframe-resident applications and network clients
  • All analysis, reporting and storage of log data is performed off-mainframe
  • Provides fine-grained audit information, real-time security alerts and separation of duties not available with traditional log-based approaches—with minimal performance impact
  • Integrates with the Guardium architecture to provide a unified solution for both mainframe and distributed database environments



Enlarge Image

Guardium for Mainframes uses a lightweight, mainframe-resident software probe called Z-TAP to capture all database activities by privileged users, mainframe-resident applications and network clients (connecting via JDBC or DB2 Connect, for example).  The Z-TAP probe operates at the DBMS level.  Both mainframe and distributed environments can be managed from a single centralized console; in addition, all audit data is automatically aggregated and normalized into a single centralized repository.