Vanguard Integrity Professionals, an independent provider of enterprise security software for mainframes, has released Vanguard Configuration Manager. The new software is designed to significantly reduce the cost and time required to test mainframe systems to assess their accordance with the Defense Information Systems Agency Security Technical Implementation Guides (DISA STIGs).

Under the Federal Information Security Management Act, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology guidance, U.S. government agencies and contractors with mainframe systems should check that their systems comply with the security configuration controls in the DISA-STIG configuration controls.

More than 100 federal agencies rely on mainframes in their major data centers. Some are directly managed by the agencies and others are managed by outsourced service providers. Agencies that utilize mainframes have the vast majority of their critical data and applications hosted on the mainframe platform. Properly securing mainframes using the configuration controls in the DISA-STIGs is critical to the cyber security of the United States. The mainframe platform is often a core component of both public and private cloud computing, and these systems need to be highly secured.

Vanguard Configuration Manager was built by Resource Access Control Facility experts to make the compliance testing process with the DISA STIGs easier, more automated and more accurate. In just a matter of hours, instead of days or weeks, Vanguard Configuration Manager will test security configuration controls and verify that a mainframe system is in accordance with the DISA STIG. Vanguard Configuration Manager enables organizations to easily move to continuous monitoring from periodic compliance reporting.