CA updates security, compliance tools

CA has today announced a bumper set of new or updated product releases, designed to build out the security and compliance areas of its IT management platform.The eight new releases include risk and governance management modules across mainframe and distributed computing environments and are designed to help IT organisations apply consistent measures, policies and processes across its operations.Colin Bannister, strategy director at CA UK and Ireland told IT PRO the vendor was three years into delivering on its enterprise IT management strategy. "Despite the credit crunch, IT organisations are still spending too much money just keeping the lights on," he said. "Rather than bringing out products throughout the year, we've taken a more holistic approach to IT management with one set of releases, addressing a couple of key areas for IT organisations," he added.Bannister said five of the products specifically address policy enforcement and compliance, while three tackled reduced IT management costs.For compliance, including industry specific regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, the Payment Card Industry Standard and IT governance frameworks, ITIL (IT Information Library) and COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology), CA is releasing its governance, risk and compliance (GRC) Manager r1.5.CA GRC Manager r1.5 is a new version of its centralised risk and compliance project management tool. It is designed to manage business policies throughout their lifecycle, correlate and analyse key performance and risk indicators and automate GRC programme management.The other four products include CA Access Control r12 for more specific, role-based access controls for servers; and CA Identity Manager r12 for managing identities in mainframe and distributed environments. Two new products, CA Security Compliance Manager and CA Software Compliance Manager addresses the who has access to what' questions in an organisation including software licences, according to Bannister. On the cost reduction side, CA IT Process Manager is a new data centre automation product to automate and visualise key IT processes around workload automation, disaster recovery, provisioning, security and virtualisation management. Bannister said integration to more than 30 IT management solutions from CA, as well as IBM, BMC, HP and Microsoft provided holistic capabilities. CA Advanced Systems Management r11.2 builds on its management of physical and virtual server environments to integrate with VMware VirtualCenter and support Sun's logical domains. And CA Event Management and Automation r11.6 targets the management of IBM Z system resources and features a switch operations facility for mainframe system administrators to visualise, monitor and manage the health of complex enterprise systems connection and fibre connectivity infrastructures.