The iPolicy Security Manager (ISM) from iPolicy Networks is a highly scalable security management system that provides centralized administration, configuration, monitoring and reporting.

The iPolicy Security Manager (ISM) delivers world-class administration, configuration, monitoring and reporting services for enterprises and service providers through a highly intuitive and very easy-to-use interface. The ISM is highly scalable, allowing concurrent management of multiple defense mechanisms such as firewall, IDS/IPS and URL filtering for a large number of iPolicy Intrusion Prevention Firewall systems. Its ease of use and collapsible multi-tiered architecture make it ideal not only for mid-size enterprises that require low overhead, plug-and-play deployments but also scales for large enterprises and service providers who need to deploy a large number of Intrusion Prevention Firewalls.

The ISM supports a distributed deployment architecture to manage a large number of iPolicy Intrusion Prevention Firewalls (IPF) that may be installed in different geographical locations or across different departments within an enterprise network. The ISM consists of four main components*:

• The Global Security Administrator (GSA) is the central component of the ISM and provides rule aggregation across multiple firewall defense mechanisms. It also provides network and security application co-management across multiple security administrators. GSA enables centralized, correlated, and consistent security enforcement across global distributed networks.
  
• The Local Security Supervisor (LSS) controls multiple iPolicy Intrusion Prevention Firewall systems for security deployment and management. In a distributed ISM deployment, a single GSA can manage multiple LSS systems over secure SSL links.
  
• The Security Data Logger (SDL) is a dedicated, highly optimized logging solution from iPolicy that has the ability to securely collect logs from multiple Intrusion Prevention Firewalls (IPF) at high rates. The SDL can be deployed in a distributed mode with close proximity to the IPFs and can be used to view logs from the GSI or forward logs via syslog. The ISM provides a unified view of the distributed logging across all SDLs on the network.
  
• The Graphical Security Interface (GSI) is a Java-based application which provides an intuitive easy to use, unified security management interface for configuration, monitoring and reporting. The GSI enables multiple administrators to manage global or Security Domain-level security policies in accordance with their administrative privileges. Additionally, iPolicy provides a feature-rich, intuitive interface – the Advanced GSI –which supports advanced features such as virtualization and co-management that are usually required in large complex networks. Administrators can choose to use the GSI or the Advanced GSI based on their configuration requirements.
  
  (Note: *All ISM components (including GSA, LSS and SDL/Syslog) can coexist and be collapsed on one system for small deployments or can be distributed across multiple systems for managing a large number of Intrusion Prevention Firewalls)

Centralized Policy Management
The centralized policy management enables administrators to create policies and rules to be applied to multiple iPolicy Intrusion Prevention Firewalls automatically. The GSI provides the ability to create global security policies which can be enforced across all Intrusion Prevention Firewalls thereby enabling a consistent security posture across the organization. This results in a high level of security and reduced cost of management and maintenance. Additionally, it reduces the response time to attacks and threats as a single change to the security policy is reflected across the network on all IPFs.

Integrated Wizard for Rapid Deployment
The GSI includes a six-step wizard with integrated help which enables rapid deployment of the Intrusion Prevention Firewall. The wizard quickly walks a user through configuring the network topology and the defense mechanisms like firewall, IDS, IPS, and URL filtering to bring a system up and running quickly and efficiently.

Interactive Network Topology Map
The GSI has a dynamic, interactive network topology map which provides a visual
on how the Intrusion Prevention Firewall is deployed. The map can also be used
as a configuration tool to make changes in the network topology changes that are then
reflected into the configuration.

Virtualization through Security Domain based Management
iPolicy Security Manager supports virtualization in the form of Security Domains.
Security Domains provide the ability to manage an organization by grouping multiple instances of Intrusion Prevention Firewalls by geographic locations or business functions. For example, an administrator can group all IPFs in different remote Sales Offices into a single Security Domain and manage its policies as a single entity. This reduces the overall effort to create and manage policies and monitor logs of each IPF, significantly reducing administrative overhead.

Security Domain based virtualization can also be used to segment enterprise
networks into isolated segments with their own virtual instance of firewall, IDS/IPS, URL filtering, etc. This can be a useful tool to create different zones within the network to contain worm and virus propagation within a zone, reducing network downtime required for post-incident cleanup. Traffic traversing across segments can have an added layer of security.

Multi-Tiered Hierarchical Management with Access Rights
The iPolicy Security Manager provides a unique feature with hierarchical co-management based access rights so multiple administrators can coexist and perform their functions based on their privileges. A root administrator can create multiple administrators at the root level with different granular access rights in configuration, monitoring, reporting, etc. Additionally, administrators can be created at the Security Domain level to have restricted access to manage policies and logs corresponding to the Intrusion Prevention Firewalls that they manage.

Global and Local Security Policy Overview
Security Policy based management of security rules allows quick customization of service offerings and enables easy security provisioning. This enables an enterprise, for example, to enforce global security policies consistently across the organization while providing the flexibility to make localized changes to each environment. The overview helps with rapid rollout of security service for service provider like environments or with changes to existing security policies across a globally distributed enterprise environment, reducing the response time to threats and attacks.

Automated Response, Monitoring and Alert Management
The ISM also provides real-time monitoring and the ability to configure automated response options including logging, alerting, and intrusion prevention actions such as session termination which can block and thwart attacks in real time. The ISM also allows administrators to trigger custom scripts. Extensive notification and reporting capabilities include posting on the event console, syslog, SNMP, email and HTML or PDF reports.

Real-Time Alerts and Statistics
The ISM provides real-time notification of security alarms and events. The ISM is capable of handling and filtering large volumes of alert and event data. Notifications can be displayed on screen in the GSI, dispatched via email or SNMP traps, and forwarded to a syslog server. The system also provides extensive real-time statistics support in tabular and graphic formats which can be viewed through the GSI.

ISM on DVD or Turn-Key
iPolicy Security Manager software is available packaged on a DVD. The ISM on DVD includes all the required components of ISM (GSA, LSS, SDL, GSI) and database software. The minimum recommended system requirements for ISM on DVD are:

• Intel Pentium 2 GHz,
• 1 GB of RAM,
• 40 GB hard disk (12-16 GB free space),
• DVD-ROM drive, and
• Microsoft Windows® XP Professional with Service Pack 2, or
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.

iPolicy Security Manager is also available pre-packaged as an appliance, the ISM Express, which is a turn-key rack-mountable server with all ISM management software factory-installed.

Click here to learn more about iPolicy's Intrusion Prevention Firewall.