Symantec ALTIRIS SECURITY EXPRESSIONS Datasheet

Data Sheet: Compliance and Security Management

Altiris® SecurityExpressions™

Proactive Security Configuration Management

Overview

One of the leading causes of security breaches and loss

of data is improperly configured systems. Achieving and

maintaining conformity across multiple systems

challenges even the most technically adept and

process-focused organizations. Even more complex is

the ongoing validation that ensures that carefully-tuned

security controls remain unchanged. Symantec solutions

support an organization’s security processes through

the implementation of sound security configuration

baselines, proactive evaluation, and comprehensive

reporting.

Benefits

• Establish baseline configurations from best practices

templates, including CIS, NIST, SANS, and others

Problem Discovery Through Automation

Effective security configuration solutions empower IT

organizations to implement a comprehensive security

practice. As a result, organizations can implement

documented audit and change processes that discover

and correct lapses in standards and procedures.

Discovery of problems is achieved with automated

assessments that provide consistent analysis without

impacting staff productivity, while integrated workflow

processes ensure closed loop verification that standards

are upheld. The ability to continually manage security

configurations from definition, evaluation, remediation

through monitoring is what distinguishes Symantec

solutions from other solutions.

Build Effective Configuration Baselines

• Evaluate IT controls against Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI DSS,

HIPAA, FISMA, ISO 27001, and their regulation

requirements

• Rapidly identify systems that deviate from established

baselines

• Quickly remediate issues within ITIL-compliant change

processes

• Assess security status through interactive reporting

• Monitor the entire enterprise with support for

Windows, Linux, and UNIX

The first step to proactive security configuration

management is to define effective baseline policies.

However, developing these baselines can be a

time-consuming, difficult task that requires extensive

expertise in configuration management. Altiris solutions

from Symantec simplify the process with industry best

practices templates that can be implemented directly or

customized to meet your needs. Altiris®

SecurityExpressions™ software also supports

homegrown configuration policies. Both

methodologies accelerate deployment while ensuring

rigorous best practices protection. The resulting policies

can be tailored and published to document

administrative controls.

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Confidence in a connected world.

Data Sheet: Compliance and Security Management
Altiris® SecurityExpressions™

Quickly Identify Non-compliant Systems

Symantec solutions allows IT and security personnel to

conduct real-time audits. Altiris technology from

Symantec can accurately and quickly compare the

system’s configurations against the company’s existing

policy. This process allows IT managers to conduct

comprehensive audits on a frequent basis, plan and

execute remediation, and re-evaluate compliance with

minimal effort. In this manner, any security issues can

be quickly identified and addressed. Companies can

validate compliance with automated security audits

rather than discover too late that vulnerabilities exist.

Tackle Issues with Closed-loop Remediation

Integration with Altiris® Helpdesk Solution™ software

and Remedy, including extensibility to other service desk

Continually Monitor Security Status

Assessing system security postures requires the ability

to not only evaluate the system, but also the ability to

easily visualize the results and assess progress.

SecurityExpressions provides concise reporting that

summarizes the results of any audit, as well as detailed

reporting that provides all of the information necessary

to remediate any vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Access to reports, including trend and noncompliance

reports, allows organizations to plan remediation

activities and evaluate risk-based compliance.

Organizations can even weigh each rule to produce

relative risk analysis, apply asset classification to weight

importance, and review roll-up scores for an entire

audit.

systems, enables organizations to plan and remediate

systems while tracking configuration changes against

ITIL-compliant processes. SecurityExpressions can

automatically open an incident based on the audit

results. IT administrators can then quickly remediate

noncompliant systems using SecurityExpressions’

built-in tools or integration with other Altiris

management solutions from Symantec such as patch

management or software delivery. Once the remediation

step is complete, a secondary audit validates the fix and

the incident can be closed. Closed-loop remediation

improves IT change control processes without disrupting

system availability.

SecurityExpressions includes a comprehensive reporting function
that allows you to compile dozens of reports such as trend, summary,
noncompliance, and detail reports.

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Confidence in a connected world.

Data Sheet: Compliance and Security Management
Altiris® SecurityExpressions™

Detect and Evaluate Mobile Systems

Mobile systems are infrequently connected to the local

network; as a result they are often missed during routine

audits. Because these systems also have infrequent

communication with management systems, they are

more at risk for failing to comply with configuration

standards. SecurityExpressions includes an optional

add-on, Audit-on-Connect, to ensure that mobile

systems can be audited as they connect to the network

rather than on a fixed schedule, so systems that are

missed in a scheduled audit can be picked up the next

time they connect.

Supports Agentless and/or Agent-based Options

SecurityExpressions offers both an agentless and an

agent-based option that can be mixed and matched as

Optional Server Requirements

• Memory—512 MB RAM

• Minimum disk space—500 MB

• ODBC Database—SQL Server 2000 or 2005, SQL

Server Express

• Services—IIS 5.0 or later; Internet Explorer 5.0 or later

to access

Operating Systems Supported

• Console—Windows Server 2000, 2003 (32- and

64-bit), XP

• Optional Server—Windows Server 2000 or Windows

2003 (32- and 64-bit)

Audit and Compliance Targets

• Operating systems—

required across all Windows, UNIX and Linux desktops,

notebooks, and servers. The included agent does not

require administrative credentials and is a perfect

solution for auditing servers. SecurityExpressions also

has an agentless approach to reach tens of thousands of

systems, effective for auditing local or remote desktops.

System Requirements

Console Requirements

• Memory—256 MB RAM (512 MB if using scheduling

service)

• Minimum disk space—500 MB

• Browser—Internet Explorer 5.0 or later

- Windows NT 4 (agentless only)/2000/2003 (32- and

64-bit)/2008 (scheduled to be supported summer

2008)/XP/Vista (32- and 64-bit)

- Solaris 8 (SPARC), 9 (SPARC), 10 (SPARC and x86)

- SUSE Linux 8, 9, 10

- Red Hat Linux 8, 9, AS3, Enterprise 4.3

- HP-UX 11, 11i

- AIX 5.1, 5.2, 5.3

System Reach

• Agents on any or all systems

• Agentless on any or all systems

• Distributed proxy for remote sites

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Confidence in a connected world.

Data Sheet: Compliance and Security Management
Altiris® SecurityExpressions™

More information

Visit our Web site

http://enterprise.symantec.com

To speak with a Product Specialist in the U.S.

Call toll-free 1 [phone]

To speak with a Product Specialist outside the U.S.

For specific country offices and contact numbers, please

visit our Web site.

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in providing security,

storage and systems management solutions to help

businesses and consumers secure and manage their

information. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif.,

Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries.

More information is available at www.symantec.com.

Symantec World Headquarters

20330 Stevens Creek Blvd.

Cupertino, CA 95014 USA

[phone]

1 [phone]

www.symantec.com

Copyright © 2008 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec and the Symantec logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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