eServer Security Planner

The planner asks you a series of questions about your business environment and your security goals. Based on your answers, the planner provides you with a list of recommendations for setting password rules, resource access rules, logging and auditing rules, and other OS specific security settings.

You can use the IBM® eServer™ Security Planner to help you plan a basic security policy for each of the operating systems that IBM servers support, including, AIX®, Linux, IBM i, Microsoft Windows 2000, and z/OS®.

The planner cannot perform the configurations it suggests. Instead, the planner provides you with information and checklists to guide you as you plan and carry out security on your IBM servers. In some cases, the planner also provides a program with commands you can run to apply the policy recommendations. The Security Planner now provides network security recommendations for each OS. Learn the basic concepts of designing network security including: network architecture, firewall and other network security technologies, TCP/IP security, and intrusion detection.

You need to run the planner once for each group of servers in your e-business environment that have similar security characteristics and requirements. Each usage produces a baseline security policy specific to your needs. For example, suppose that you need a very secure environment for your mission critical production system, but can tolerate more risk for your company's internal development system. Here, you need to complete the planner twice, once for each system, because they each require a different level of security.