IBM unveiled a series of security products and services
for customers struggling with cloud security planning and management. The security tools include the rather awkwardly-named
IBM Managed Security Services Hosted Security Event and Log Management and the
scanning service IBM Managed Security Services Hosted Vulnerability Management.
IBM’s security consulting services will also help organizations with
security planning by creating a roadmap, performing an assessment, and
identifying application security needs.
The company’s incident and event management tool moves to the
cloud via the new IBM Managed Security Services Hosted Security Event and Log
Management solution This enhanced offering consolidates the security event and log
data of all operating systems, applications and infrastructure equipment
into a single location for IT managers to assess and respond to real-time and
historical traffic. Organizations can also outsource these tasks to IBMÃ’s
Security Operation Centers, the company said.
The scanning service, IBM Managed Security Services Hosted
Vulnerability Management, checks all packets going in and out of network
devices, servers, Web applications, and databases.
IBM Security Virtual Server Protection for VMware integrates what a company spokesman calls introspection monitoring. It’s essentially a virtual doorman that scans
all traffic outside the virtual machine to detect potential malware attacks,
and the operating system inside to confirm it is running properly. The
protection checks whether any malicious code is running, such as root-kits. As this is tied to the hypervisor and protects the virtual
machines from the ground up, this is available only for VMware hypervisors,
according to the IBM spokesman. The virtual doorman hooks into the security APIs available with the yet-to-be-released VMware Fusion 4. IBM is exploring adding other
hypervisor support.
For more, read the eWeek article IBM Introduces Security Services to Protect Cloud Environments.
