The most valuable features of the product are probably the capabilities, the functionality, and then the reliability.
It gives us a consolidated management tool to keep track of the user directories on our z/VM platform.
CA VM:Secure for z/VM (CA VM:Secure) is a comprehensive security and directory management system for z/VM.
It’s designed to help you minimize risk by establishing rigid safeguards and controlling access to z/VM and Linux on System z guest resources.
CA VM:Secure helps prevent inadvertent security exposures by automatically maintaining synchronization between the z/VM user directory and your security rules. It helps make it easier to enforce IT-wide security practices automatically, identify security offenders and produce complete security reports and audit listings.
CA VM:Secure help you optimize your z/VM environment by providing:
CA VM:Secure offers the following features:
Comprehensive Security Management: CA VM:Secure provides a comprehensive suite of security management features to protect IBM z/OS mainframe systems, addressing various aspects of security such as access control, authentication, encryption, and threat detection.
Granular Access Control: The solution allows administrators to define fine-grained access controls based on user roles and privileges, ensuring that only authorized users have access to specific resources and operations.
Strong User Authentication: CA VM:Secure supports multiple authentication methods, including password-based authentication, digital certificates, and multi-factor authentication, providing flexibility in choosing the appropriate level of user authentication.
Audit and Compliance Support: The solution offers robust auditing capabilities, enabling organizations to monitor user activity, track system events, and generate detailed audit reports. This helps in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and facilitates internal auditing.
Data Protection: Users are offered encryption mechanisms to protect sensitive data at rest and during transmission, safeguarding valuable information from unauthorized access and ensuring data confidentiality and integrity.
Centralized Security Administration: The solution provides a centralized interface for managing security policies, user accounts, and system configurations. This streamlines administrative tasks, simplifies security management, and improves overall efficiency.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention: It includes built-in mechanisms for detecting and preventing security threats and unauthorized access attempts. This proactive defense helps in safeguarding the mainframe environment from potential attacks.
User Provisioning and De-Provisioning Automation: The solution offers automated workflows for user provisioning and de-provisioning, reducing manual effort and ensuring timely and accurate management of user accounts.
Secure File Transfer: CA VM:Secure supports secure file transfer capabilities between z/OS systems and other platforms, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data during transmission.
Integration with Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solutions: Users can benefit from its integration capabilities with external IAM solutions, allowing them to leverage existing identity management systems and establish centralized control over user identities and access.
Customizable Reporting: CA VM:Secure offers customizable reports and dashboards, enabling organizations to generate tailored reports that provide insights into security events, user activity, and compliance status.
CA VM:Secure was previously known as CA VM:Secure for z/VM.
Neovera, Vodafone Turkey, Comcast
The most valuable features of the product are probably the capabilities, the functionality, and then the reliability.
It gives us a consolidated management tool to keep track of the user directories on our z/VM platform, as opposed to having to use a bunch of disparate products to accomplish the task.
It might be nice if it had more of a modern-type GUI interface. Right now, it's all green screen-based.
Other than that, it does what it needs to do.
I've been using it for about eight years, since I joined the team.
The upgrades I've been involved in have been smooth and compared to other products they seem to be pretty smooth.
We had an issue a few weeks ago in a test environment after putting an upgrade on, but we think it turned out to be that it wasn't really CA's fault. We think it's a problem with IBM and the GDPS product, and a test was being done with it the night before.
It caused some weirdness with other products that we found out later, because it allowed two machines to get read/write access to a single minidisk, which never should have happened. That caused problems for CA but it wasn't really their product.
We ended up on the phone with them for quite a while until we realised it was something else.
As far as I know, it scales well. In our environment, we have four production LPARs and four development LPARs, and we haven't had any issues as our number of machines grows. We're up to over 450 Linux virtual machines and no issues yet with scalability.
Technical support is very good. Any time we've had an issue, they've been very responsive getting it addressed, such as when we went to the SSI-based z/VM clusters, there were some issues we ran into - a couple of things that weren't working quite right - but they got them addressed quickly.
I use the online community some and, of course, their online support system, which works well.
This product was already in place when I joined the team.
This product is definitely worth taking a look at and comparing it with other products, if there's something else they're considering. As far as the functionality, stability and integration with the other products in their suite, I think this product would be hard-pressed to beat.
