ERA
RACF Security Risk Assessment and Reporting
Quickly and easily generate customizable reports to assess and audit RACF events, and easily identify RACF security violations and security-related changes with ERA.
What is ERA?
Making Sense of Complex Data
Today’s enterprise data centers trust the IBM® Z mainframe to process millions of transactions per day and the IBM Resource Access Control Facility (RACF) to manage user access to critical resources. While these provide a strong foundation for data and user management, monitoring the RACF events that occur within your organization is an integral component of data security. However, it is no surprise complex RACF events produce complex data. ERA: Easy RACF Audit provides a simpler method of discerning and generating a customized report on security-related RACF changes than the use of RACF alone would allow.
Event. Report. Audit.
The formatting of extracted RACF event data is often decipherable by only a handful of veteran security professionals within a large-scale organization, making it difficult for the majority of end users to browse, query, or understand this important data. As a RACF risk assessment and auditing tool, ERA presents a comprehensive, interactive view of the RACF events of your choosing while formulating a complete audit trail via its customizable reporting capabilities. Through the utilization of ERA, end users are able to discover successful and unsuccessful security events on their IBM Z mainframe, in turn enabling their organization to identify, rectify, and eliminate security risks and violations.
ERA Benefits
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IDENTIFY SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY
Extensive RACF event reporting and data mining
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QUALIFY ACCESS VIOLATIONS
Detect unauthorized attempts to access system resources
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ENTERPRISE-WIDE ACCESS
Intuitive GUI and ISPF interface for PC and mainframe users
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NO BATCH REPORTS NEEDED
Automated event extract/export from SMF dump files
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MINIMAL LEARNING CURVE
Drag-and-Drop report building with sample reports included
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DETAILED INSIGHTS TO DATA SETS
Online reporting allows for extensive sorting and masking criteria
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UNLIMITED IMPORTING/PARSING
Handles multiple LPARS/Systems
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SIMPLE, EFFECTIVE REPORTING
Filter, view, print, or export reports
How it Works
ERA Server: Accessibility and Insight
ERA improves the accessibility of RACF event data through automating the extraction of SMF datasets and sending these datasets to the ERA Server. Datasets can also be easily browsed and selected via ERA’s ISPF application. Once in the ERA Server, data is managed and reviewed via ERA’s relational database repository. The repository is able to import/parse SMF security event data sent from multiple IBM Z mainframe servers, allowing authorized users quick, easy insight to security events across their organization.
Manage Your Repository
Although ERA handles RACF information, a PC application component is included for greater flexibility and graphical capabilities when configuring the ERA Server and while querying or viewing security data in the repository. PC application capabilities include importing new event information, browsing the database content, analyzing the historical database of RACF security events, selectively removing data that is no longer needed, and other essential tasks.
Monitor RACF Security Events
In addition to exporting SMF datasets from RACF and easily managing these datasets on the PC application, ERA enables authorized users to assess the datasets via its interactive reporting tool. The interactive reporting tool allows the user to immediately identify suspicious RACF activity, ferret out changes that introduced risks, and have a complete audit trail of these events. All reports display dynamic graphics for trend identification, and may be filtered, viewed, printed, or exported. With a built-in library of sample reports and drag-and-drop report building capability, ERA allows the user to easily modify data reports to fit their environment’s needs, including creating specialized and customized reports.
ERA’s seamless integration, intuitive design, and in-depth analysis make it the tool of choice for RACF security assessment, auditing, and report generation.
Who Uses ERA
Access Across the Enterprise
Designed for security auditors, security officers, RACF administrators, and systems engineers/administrators alike, ERA is the ideal solution for enterprise data centers concerned with pinpointing violations in their RACF security events and presenting this information to those who need it. ERA is equally accessible to both sides of the house – IBM Z mainframe users and PC users – and requires no training, no knowledge of SQL, and no programming experience due to its intuitive GUI interface, PC application, and drag-and-drop report building.
Reporting: The Auditor’s Assistant
With all relevant data conveniently located in the ERA repository, auditors can access the repository via any ODBC-compliant application without requiring assistance or impacting downtime. ERA provides thorough insight to security-related activity with great ease by allowing auditors and other authorized personnel to apply extensive sorting and masking criteria when specifying reports. Built for those who need to analyze, detect, and/or communicate data security events, ERA provides enterprise organizations a safer tomorrow.
Looking to further simplify your RACF Administration?
ERA pairs perfectly with ERQ (Easy RACF Query). ERQ provides comprehensive, yet simple, online RACF administration and reporting at an affordable price. Easily CLONE, DELETE, LIST and/or REPLICATE profiles with a single key stroke. ERQ offers a fully customizable ISPF interface for flexible and efficient RACF administration, as well as easy-to-use programming services for writing custom RACF applications/procedures using a straightforward API interface. Users can easily issue commands or generate health reports with little or no prior training required.
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PROTECT YOUR TOMORROW TODAY WITH ERA!
