Stories about: Tivoli

IBM is aggressively expanding its security portfolio in hopes of becoming the de facto source of advice and technology for businesses looking to adopt high-level IT governance and risk management strategies -- a transformation among customers that officials at Big Blue cite as both ongoing and inevitable.

IBM upgraded its identity management capabilities with tools to help customers manage user access to sensitive information, the company said Wednesday.

Faced with looming regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Craig Shumard, chief information security officer for healthcare provider Cigna, knew he needed better tools for role-based access control.

The Westpac Banking Corporation is creating a Virtual Enterprise Resource Directory to manage and automate access control while ensuring information is made available on a "need to know" basis.

Highly distributed organsations run their IT systems on a managed services provider (MSP) model -- supporting numbers of offices dispersed over a geographic area. Mark Scott, president of The Utility Company, says the best model for this combines advanced network monitoring with a franchising system, such as that used by Dunkin' Donuts. His company is an MSP serving a growing population of small companies -- "five-person PR firms, 30-person law offices" -- across North America from its Ottawa, Canada, base.

Network access control stands out as one of the most promising security technologies, but it also is one of the most misunderstood. Here are explanations that may clarify some of your questions.

Network access control stands out as one of the most promising security technologies, but it also is one of the most misunderstood. That's in part because vendors want in on the NAC buzz and are clamoring for attention, despite selling products that are only peripheral. This raises problems for companies that want to consider NAC but don't have a solid sense of what it is, what it might do for them and what kind of investment it requires.

IBM on Wednesday announced its intent to acquire Internet Security Systems for US$1.3 billion in an all-cash deal expected to be completed by year-end.

Biometric security systems have one particularly critical vulnerability: How do you replace your finger if a hacker figures out how to duplicate it? An IBM research team working on that problem says it's recently cracked a major problem in the area of "cancelable biometrics."

Vendors are ramping up their efforts to address enterprise identity management with products designed to manage user privileges across multiple platforms, to simulate the impact of potential changes and to help developers build more secure applications.