Lights-Out Automation Meets Security

Between the PowerTech and Robot family of products, Help/Systems shares many common customers. The third week of September, I had the honor of attending the PowerTech IBM i Security Event of the Year in Las Vegas. It was really a pleasure to represent our executive team at this conference, which was full of security world abbreviations like PCI, SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, COBIT, ISO, and ITIL. (Amazingly, after working with the PowerTech solutions for three years, I actually understand many of these.)

I spoke to the group about the world of Help/Systems and how we are more than just Robot (it still surprises me how many customers think of us as Robot/SCHEDULE only). I also discussed how to couple the Help/Systems Robot solutions with PowerTech to automate auditor tasks.

Automating Security

At the conference, we demonstrated how to e-mail compliance reports using a Robot/SCHEDULE job; how to back up audit journal receivers using Robot/SAVE object lists; how Interact and Robot/CONSOLE co-exist, even though both products want to allocate QSYSOPR; and how to automate reporting for Network Security and Authority Broker.

We also showed the attendees one of my favorite Robot/SCHEDULE commands, RBTSTRLRN, which learns the SBMJOB parameters from jobs that are about to be submitted to batch. And, we demonstrated report options from the PowerTech products.

Lights Out

A security team has to run processes periodically—weekly, monthly, quarterly, and so forth. Robot/SCHEDULE and its companion, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, are perfect for that. They can run audit reports on all your servers: IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows.

My conclusion? The security world isn’t any different than the rest of the Robot world—you can always find opportunities for automation. Lights out is best!