SkyView Partners has announced a new version of SkyView Policy Minder for IBM i and i5/OS.

“There are a number of exciting new enhancements to our product," says Carol Woodbury, president of SkyView Partners. "Because compliance requirements keep changing, we have tried to add functionality that will help everyone develop processes that are easier to implement and deploy," she says. "This release focuses on managing user profile configuration. Our customers have various ways that they need to report on user profile compliance. We’ve responded, providing more options for checking and reporting on their user profile compliance requirements. Beta testers have loved the new features and have already integrated them into their production processes,” says Woodbury.

"I have the new SkyView Policy Minder V1.5 on our systems, and I really like it," says Bill Shalck of CDW. "I appreciate the GUI interface as well as the ability to select/omit *GROUP and *STATUS on the User Profile template,” he says.

SkyView Policy Minder for IBM i and i5/OS was designed by Carol Woodbury to enforce compliance with an organization’s security policies. The product checks the security compliance settings (authority and ownership) for user profiles, libraries, directories and objects, as well as adopted authority settings of programs and service programs, auditing values of objects, file shares, system values, authorities to authorization lists and more to see if they are in compliance with your security policy. Policy Minder includes a FixIt command to put non-compliant items back in compliance and comprehensive reporting capabilities. Commands are available for integration with established processes such as change management and batch processing. Guidance for regulations such as the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is also available.

In the latest SkyView Policy Minder V1.5, new fields have been added to the csv and outfile versions of the user profile report to include more system information. This enhancement is in direct response to clients' requests and helps add value and reduce the time and effort needed to respond to their auditors.  In addition, more ways to report on user profile compliance have been added in response to customers’ specific requests. You can now define a library policy that will examine the security-relevant attributes of outqs. More reports can be automatically emailed off the system. This enhances customers’ ability to easily check on the compliance of their system.

"We are very excited about this new release," said John Vanderwall, CEO of SkyView Partners.

"The compliance world is changing, and this new release is an example of how we listen to our customers’ new requirements and respond to them.  Our goal is to continually improve our products to help our customers reduce the amount of time spent on compliance duties as well as keep everyday security configuration verification to a very manageable level and remove those manual verification tasks,” he said.

General availability of this new release is set for September 13, 2010.

About SkyView Partners

SkyView Partners, Inc is a security specialty firm working with IBM AS/400, iSeries and System i customers and Business Partners to architect and implement sound security policies and practices for IBM i and i5/OS. SkyView Partners’ product development and technical services are led by Carol Woodbury, former Chief Engineering Manager and Security Architect for the IBM iSeries product line.  SkyView Partners is committed to providing clients with products and services that save time, reduce costs and simplify the management of security compliance.  To learn more, visit the SkyView Partners website at www.skyviewpartners.com

SkyView Partners is dedicated to providing software to help you solve your security compliance and policy issues. SkyView Partners was founded by John Vanderwall and Carol Woodbury. Prior to forming the partnership with Woodbury to focus on developing a security practice, Vanderwall most recently spent several years as a founder of the software division of an AS/400 security firm and served as vice president of sales and marketing. Woodbury worked for 16 years with IBM in Rochester, Minn., and served for more than 10 years as the AS/400 Security Architect and Chief Engineering Manager of Security Technology for IBM's Enterprise Server Group. During this time, Woodbury provided security architecture and design consultations with IBM Business Partners and large AS/400 customers. She is known worldwide as an author and speaker on security technology, specializing in i5/OS and IBM i security issues. Woodbury has published her third book, IBM i and i5/OS Security & Compliance: A Practical Guide from 29th Street Press, has written numerous articles on security, and is a contributing author on security for MCPress Online and other IBM midrange publishers.

Find out whether your system's security configuration is in compliance with your security policies with SkyView Policy Minder. Find out your system's vulnerabilities lie, receive an explanation of the issues and suggestions on where to start with SkyView Risk Assessor. Generate the audit reports you need for security and compliance without having to understand the complexities of the IBM i audit journal with SkyView Audit Journal Reporter . Let SkyView Partners' Support Team install and configure SkyView products and schedule your automated security compliance reports through the SkyView IBM i Security Compliance Solution.