UPDATED: IBM is integrating its security service with the Tivoli Security Compliance Manager (SCM), officials announced Friday.
The result for current SCM customers is a service that provides an extra measure of security against today’s viruses, worms and exploits.
James Galvin, a market manager for Tivoli security, said the integrated solution represents a big security improvement for customers; before the integration, the pre-defined policies that covered vulnerabilities were only updated every few months.
“It wasn’t a continual process until we could offer this integration,” Galvin said. “So really it’s allowing our customers to have a continually updated security policy based on the latest patch and latest vulnerability out there.”
Tivoli customers who opt for the integrated offering will need to subscribe to a yearly fee for the service.
The IBM Global Business Security Index is compiled by 2,700 employees monitoring a half-million devices worldwide to recognize the latest security vulnerabilities like bugs, viruses and worms. When a new threat is discovered, customers are warned of the new vulnerability by e-mail, pager or Web-based portal.
IBM’s SCM customers will have that information piped directly into the Tivoli product. They will also receive the reports. The SCM product scans a network’s servers and systems to see what operating system and applications they are running, as well as the latest patches they are using.
With daily updates fed automatically into the SCM, network managers will be able to identify which machines are running out- of-date patches or need a new patch to counter the effects of the new vulnerability.
Officials see the integrated solutions as a way for IT managers to get a handle on the barrage of security vulnerabilities, and the hype surrounding them, that impact the corporate network’s security and performance. According to IBM, the security index detects 100 million suspected or actual attacks in a month on average.