Patrick Townsend & Associates has announced the release of the company's new product, Alliance LogAgent for System i.

This new application can help enterprise customers bring their IBM iSeries/System i platforms into compliance with PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other regulations requiring active security monitoring of their networks. The Alliance LogAgent solution extracts System i security events, formats the events to the open standard for Syslog events, and transmits them to a system log server such as Syslogd or Syslog-ng. Once security events from all enterprise servers are centralized, they can be analyzed by security information and event management (SIEM) software for security breaches.

Until now, the System i platform could not participate in a coherent enterprise strategy using open standards for logging. Customers with a variety of IBM, UNIX, Linux, and Windows servers were not able to implement the same SIEM strategy for all systems. The Alliance solution now enables a single, common approach to log collection and management.

Patrick Townsend, president of Patrick Townsend & Associates, said "The effectiveness of log analysis and management software depends on the ability to consolidate all of the security information and events in one place. Only then can patterns be analyzed for potential security breaches. The Alliance LogAgent solution lets enterprise customers connect their System i platforms directly into their centralized SIEM security solutions. By providing a System i log agent and integrating all of our encryption and data security solutions into the logging architecture our customers get unmatched support for security monitoring."

The Alliance LogAgent solution extracts security information from a variety of locations on the System i platform including the IBM security journal QAUDJRN, the system operatorÆs message queue, the IBM Apache web server, OpenSSH, PHP, MySQL and user applications. The application allows for custom security events, filtering of security events to minimize network impacts, compatibility with the Syslogd communications protocol, and secure transport using SSL/TLS communications.

In conjunction with the release of Alliance LogAgent for the System i, all of the current data encryption and security solutions from Patrick Townsend & Associates have been enhanced to support security event notification. For example, if a user is denied access to encrypted credit card information by the Townsend AES encryption solution, a security event is raised and reported through Alliance LogAgent. Authority failures in FTP sessions, Web service requests, and other Internet services are also supported. The integration of data security applications with log management provides the Enterprise customer a complete security solution without gaps.

The Alliance LogAgent solution is compatible with major SIEM vendors including ArcSight, Symantec, LogLogic, and many others. The solution can co-exist with intrusion detection systems (IDS) and vulnerability scanning systems for enhanced monitoring for security breaches. Alliance LogAgent supports UDP communications to Syslogd, and TCP and SSL/TLS TCP connections to Syslog-ng.

Patrick Townsend & Associates, Inc. provides NIST certified data encryption and security solutions to Enterprise customers for a variety of enterprise server platforms. The company can be reached on the Web at Patrick Townsend & Associates or call 360-357-8971.