Halcyon Software Announces Major New Enhancements to Audit Journal Manager

PETERBOROUGH, England, October 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Halcyon Software announces a new release of Audit Journal Manager, a specialist utility for IBM i enabling real-time alerting and reporting from the audit journal; the software also assists with intrusion detection.

Halcyon Audit Journal Manager (PTF Level 287), enables companies to receive immediate notification on any attempted security breaches, monitor and report on access to confidential information, considerably save time on labour-intensive reporting tasks and assists in migrating to a higher security level.

Key software enhancements include improved performance, the addition of new reporting templates and new "rule" sets for monitoring auditing failure, security, service and systems management.      

Performance Improvements

Ashley Giddings, Senior Technical Services Manager at Halcyon software said "For sites using IBM Power Systems and the IBM i platform for their mission-critical activities, it is not uncommon for more than 3000 entries to be written to the audit journal ("QAUDJRN") on average every minute, logging all activities and events.  By boosting the performance in our software, Audit Journal Manager is now able to process approximately 400,000 actions per day and the software can process the audit journal entries 18 times faster. This ensures that the software will always keep up with the busiest of computer systems and handle the continuing trend for businesses to process vast amounts of information more quickly."  

Reporting Enhancements

Audit Journal Manager now has 35 report templates, which can also be customized and adapted to suit diverse businesses operating in different industry sectors.  

The key business benefit is that reporting is simplified saving IT staff considerable time and the labour-intensive task of generating reports for internal use or for external auditors.

The report templates can be selected from menu options and examples include, "program changes to adopt authority", "authority failures", "system value changes", "object ownership", "changed user on a job description", "intrusion detection" and "profile swap".

New Rule Sets

System administrators can create sets of rules within the software which can be grouped to monitor different days, times, applications or users. Once these rules are defined, the software can be easily rolled out across a company's whole IBM i environment.

The software now ships with examples of rule sets in four new categories, including auditing failure, security, service and systems management. This now means that configuration for customers is made easier and the software is quicker to set up and deploy.

Audit Journal Manager enables IBM i customers to control and restrict which specific users can perform which product functions and also has in-depth logging to track and report on "who did what and when."

The real- time alerting feature (through email and SMS to cell phones) and escalation lists means that authority failures (and therefore potential intruders) can be quickly detected and brought to a security teams' immediate attention.

The key benefit for security officers and systems administrators is the continuous monitoring for suspicious activity, such as, users changing their own or others authority to higher levels, the quick detection of invalid attempts to sign on to the system and being informed when sensitive objects (e.g. the Payroll file) are created, deleted, restored, moved or renamed. Changes in access rights to confidential or sensitive information, profile swapping and changes to system values (security settings) can also be tracked as these changes can have a significant impact to the business on system performance and compliance with security policies.

Giddings concludes, "We have listened to customer feedback to ensure that Audit Journal Manager is continuously improved to reflect the needs of system administrators and security officers working in a busy and demanding environment. The new enhancements ensure configuration, reporting and deployment of the software is even quicker - giving reassurance that any potential security threats or breaches are being automatically and immediately detected, enabling operational staff to concentrate their time on supporting the core activities of the company."

To learn more customers can visit: http://www.halcyonsoftware.com/products/auditjournalmanager/

Audit Journal Manager is tier priced based on IBM processor group and is available as a separate utility from £1094 including maintenance.

About Halcyon Software

Halcyon Software is a global leader in multi-platform systems management software. With more than 20 years of delivering proven solutions and first class customer support, Halcyon's products proactively monitor, manage and automate IT operations. Large multi-nationals, corporate and public sector data centres as well as small to medium sized organizations throughout the world rely on Halcyon Software to ensure their mission-critical systems, core applications and services are available 24/7.

Halcyon solutions support IBM enterprise class systems, including the IBM i®, AIX® as well as Windows® and Linux® platforms.

Halcyon Software reduces the complexity of systems monitoring and automation. Solutions deliver real ROI by automating 100 percent of routine tasks to free up valuable resources, reduce operating costs and minimize the risk of human error.

With regional offices in Peterborough UK, Philadelphia, USA and Melbourne, Australia, Halcyon also has a world-wide network of partners and distributors supporting EMEA the Americas, and Asia Pac territories.

CONTACTS
Carole Chandler        
Halcyon Software    
+441733234995
carole.chandler@halcyonsoftware.com