Proteus™ Audit and Control for Regulatory Compliance

The BlueCat Advantage Driven by the need to comply with corporate and security regulations, organizations are looking to IP Address Management Solutions to provide real-time and historical data about configuration management, network usage, resource availability and network access control. Proteus is the only IPAM appliance of its kind to extend and simplify the availability of important usage data that is a key requirement for compliance with SOX, GLBA, HIPAA and other regulations. Proteus Helps Organizations To: Track and manage IP allocations across the enterprise with full audit trail Manage service level agreements by continually monitoring IP allocations DNS and DHCP usage Enforce and monitor corporate usage policies Provide a change management environment for IP level activity Comply with external regulations such as SOX, GLBA, HIPAA Proteus Provides: Accountability: Proteus tracks all network configuration changes and ties these changes to the people who implemented them. Proteus assigns responsibility with the usage of regulatory frameworks. Transparency: Proteus makes an organization’s operations more auditable by increasing visibility into core network activity. Measurability: Proteus provides ongoing monitoring and reporting with a baseline. Proteus also improves service levels, monitors usage and provides a highly available infrastructure that is fully auditable.

Information is Power

As enterprises look to deploy next generation communications applications, the availability and pro-active management of IP infrastructure becomes increasingly important. It’s a well known fact that companies large and small are consuming IP’s much faster as more applications and devices enter the network. IP addresses are now the most critical and scarce resource on your enterprise network.

Each networked device -- web servers, email servers, network storage, printers, PDA’s, workstations and wireless clients -- require the allocation and use of at least one IP address. Deployments of next generation applications such as VoIP and Unified Communications are doubling IP allocations overnight. As organizations take steps to ensure that IP’s are provisioned, tracked, managed and monitored; the need for IP Address Management has never been stronger.

IP Address Management (IPAM) is a framework designed to simplify the management of IP inventories, while managing dynamic IP address services (DHCP) and IP name services (DNS). IPAM done right is not merely responsible for cataloging IP allocations but should give organizations multiple perspectives on the topology and configuration of the network, to extend its capabilities and guarantee a high level of service provisioning. Effective IPAM helps organizations to eliminate network conflicts by tracking users and devices using powerful audit and reporting tools. The reporting and auditing functionality of an IPAM solution will enable organizations to not only maintain corporate service level arrangements (SLA’s), but also to comply with external regulations as imposed by government agencies.

What Needs to be Tracked?

IPAM solutions are responsible for maintaining accurate data on IP inventories and their related allocations through domain name services (DNS) and dynamic assignment (DHCP). Organizations must have real-time data about IP address allocation by configuration, zone and subnet, while also tracking MAC addresses, authorization access data and more. In large networks resolving accessibility issues becomes increasingly challenging, especially when multiple locations are involved. At any time, an IT manager might need to access information on IP addresses in use, when they were assigned, what devices are consuming the address, the identity of the end-user, and the network or subnet. Having this level of visibility greatly reduces network abuse, increases network management efficiency, and enhances network security.

Compliance with External Regulations

Beyond compliance with corporate use and access policies, IPAM plays a crucial role by helping organizations to comply with external regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX); a policy that is designed to tighten internal controls of financial reporting and enforce accountability through strengthened internal controls over the transfer of sensitive financial data across corporate networks. SOX compliance is no longer merely an afterthought for public companies but rather, a requirement; should a company or individual breach the regulation, fines of up to $25 million and 5 years in prison can be levied against an organization and its executives. It is no wonder that organizations are spending between 10-15% of their IT budgets on SOX compliance. (Gartner Group, 2006)

Companies complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are undergoing initiatives to standardize document processes, segregate job duties and tasks, implement disaster recovery plans and invest in business continuity tools. A key area that requires ongoing diligence is data accessibility, and network change management; as policy stipulates that all network changes, authorized or unauthorized must be tracked and auditable. Companies using makeshift IPAM solutions comprised of spreadsheets or distributed grid-databases loosely linked to DNS and DHCP servers are unable to provide the level of forensic information demanded by SOX regulations.

Proteus IPAM Appliance

Focusing on the Cost of Compliance

Complying with SOX, GLBA and HIPAA now requires that organizations have real-time access to IPAM data. Corporate officers must be able to immediately access critical network information and they must be able to monitor and enforce network access control; this is now keenly appreciated as a cost of doing business.

Organizations are forced to use a variety of point-based solutions to provide networkchange management, configuration management and access policy enforcement while providing audit control. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that these tasks are typically managed between multiple technology groups (application team, network team, security team, etc) . As mentioned, according to Gartner Group, your organization may already be spending up to 15% of their IT budget on SOX compliance. What is your organization doing to reduce the cost of compliance while improving network manageability and usability?

Moving Towards A Framework

Organizations cannot afford to compromise the integrity of their production environments. Therefore, capacity planning, network monitoring, configuration management and network access control are critical to operations. IPAM is at the forefront of providing a framework that can help provide a risk-oriented approach to policy enforcement and monitoring, without cost to quality of service or network reliability.

The Proteus Enterprise IPAM Appliance from BlueCat Networks provides a next generation approach to IP Address Management.

Using industry leading Multi-Core technology, Proteus is a carrier-grade appliance solution with an advanced audit and reporting capability that helps organizations enforce accountability and drive regulatory compliance.

Proteus’ Advanced Audit and Control Helps Enterprises to:

Enforce Accountability:

Proteus uses a commercial-grade database that manages and tracks physical network configurations at the IP inventory, DNS and DHCP configuration levels. This enables administrators to have advanced knowledge of network level changes that can negatively affect network performance. All data on changes is searchable by configuration, network, subnet, device, object tag, or by the administrator who implemented the change.

Proteus further drives accountability by tracking individual network access. This means that organizations can track network access at the end user level to gain a better understanding of what physical or data assets an end user might have access to. In the event of a security breach, this forensic data proves to be invaluable.

Maintain Business Continuity:

Proteus’s advanced monitoring and provisioning capabilities ensure that network access and ongoing operations are transparent to the end user. Proteus is continually gathering metrics on DNS and DHCP performance and comparing that data to the network model as designed in the Proteus network modeling environment (modeling core). If a part of the network is experiencing a service challenge such as an unresolvable server, Proteus takes notice and can notify the administrator. Proteus provides advanced monitoring for all DHCP and network admissions to ensure that only the approved users have access to data. This enables organizations to improve service levels, provide VoIP dial-tone high availability and focus on business process, not network configurations.

Measure Performance:

Proteus’ audit and report functions enable organizations to continually improve the operation of core network resources. Regardless of the network’s physical location, Proteus can inform management about network congestion, DNS performance and DHCP performance while also reporting on overall service availability. Proteus maintains a historical record of the network at all stages of operation, ensuring that an organization always has access to a reliable baseline and making performance benchmarking easy. With Proteus, administrators have the data required to improve service availability and rapidly integrate applications into the network without sacrifice.

Many first and second generation IPAM solutions focus on simply gathering abstracted sets of data on access controls, configuration management and event logging. Left alone these data sets may seem valuable, but they still require advanced analysis which further adds to the cost of compliance and slows response time for conflict or event resolution. Often, expensive third party analysis tools or manual scripting is required to make use of the data.

Next generation IPAM solutions like Proteus improve retention of the correct data sets and improve enterprise-wide data integration while providing data accessibility and manageability. Beyond driving accountability, transparency and performance management, Proteus additionally enables organizations to improve:

Data Retention:
Proteus is based on an enterprise class relational database management system that has a purpose-built data model. This model can be further enhanced with user defined fields and meta data.

Proteus enables organizations to move beyond simple cataloging of IP addresses by providing the ability to attach useful information to records such as asset tags, object types, administrator information, serial numbers, warranty information, object location, group membership... organizations can attach virtually any type of information to a record. Object tagging in this fashion simplifies regulatory compliance by providing descriptive data sets in addition to the required IP data. Additionally, reports give organizations an enhanced visibility into key areas with a historical view -- a critical element for auditing.

Integration:
Proteus is based on an industry standard commercial database. Unlike some solutions using Symantec databases that have proprietary formats, Proteus simplifies integration with other third party applications: provisioning systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages, and framework management tools such as HP OpenView, to name a few. The well defined data structure and availability of API’s (SOAP, XML and SNMP, SQL) make Proteus the best choice for enterprise-wide integration.

Accessibility and Manageability:
Proteus is the only IPAM solution to provide Object Tagging for customized asset grouping. Using Object Tags organizations can assign navigational tags or descriptive tags to groups of objects (by location, configuration, subnet, device type, user group, administrator, etc.). Administrators can use Object Tags to rapidly navigate expansive configurations; eliminating the need for administrators to traverse complex IP tree structures. Object Tags also enable organizations to run complex queries and searches on the network that dramatically improve network visibility and logical layout, while enhancing overall usability. Proteus enables organizations to build, manage and monitor network configurations that are structured to conform to business and regulatory needs.

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