Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires enterprises to establish, monitor, and certify internal controls on any system that might impact accurate financial reporting.  SOX 404 also requires the company's auditor to certify and report on management's assessment of the effectiveness of these controls.  For IT professionals, SOX 404 requires that there be appropriate internal controls in place to monitor and audit any change to any software system that plays a part in the company's financial transactions, controls, or reports.  Translated, this means that IT departments must have the appropriate IT controls in place for monitoring and auditing who is accessing financial data and what they are doing with that data.  IT officers and staff must work closely with internal auditors, the CIO, and other officers to ensure they have a solution that not only allows them to pass their SOX audit, but also gives them the confidence that their financial data is being monitored and protected.

The Solution:  Tizor Mantra for SOX

Tizor's Mantra is a scalable, high performance network appliance that continuously monitors and audits all data access traffic to and from database servers and file systems.  Mantra reduces business risk and lowers IT costs by enabling the highest level of compliance assurance, data protection, and data privacy.

The Mantra platform offers a scalable, intelligent, high performance solution for SOX Section 404 requirements, giving you the ability to:

• Easily deploy a comprehensive data auditing solution without disrupting business operations.
• Automatically discover where financial data assets reside in your enterprise—and determine exactly who is doing what with those assets.
• Monitor privileged user activity—including DBAs and system administrators—in real time, including schema and privilege changes.
• Satisfy segregation of duties requirements for DBAs and other compliance or security staff, with no impact on productivity.
• Audit database, file server, and mainframe data activity, all from a single appliance.
• Minimize the number of appliances required to audit the often scattered repositories of corporate financial data assets.
• Employ pioneering real-time analytics to identify and alert on unusual or anomalous user behavior in time to respond.
• Generate a broad range of reports for auditors, managers, executives, and other stakeholders.
• Automate compliance reporting workflow and approvals.

Using Mantra's predefined SOX Policy Templates, you can quickly deploy a comprehensive solution that satisfies the industry control frameworks favored by most auditors, such as COBIT and ISO 17799:2005.  Mantra SOX templates are designed to help you monitor:

• Privileged user activity
• Logins and logouts
• Application and data trigger modifications
• Changes to user definitions and privileges
• Data structure changes
• Read and write access to sensitive data
• Errors and exceptions
• Sources of data access activity—host names, user IDs, IP addresses, and port numbers
• Time, program name, accessed data size, data access command, and other parameters for each data access transaction

Policy tools and templates simplify not only the deployment of the required controls, but also the follow-on requirement to prove that they are actually in place.

All audit data is stored securely in the Mantra environment.  Mantra includes advaced forensic tools for analyzing audit data and generating reports for any incident or transaction, to any level of granularity.  In addition, all audit data can be archived for future analysis.

Figure1:  SOX Policy Summary Report

MANTRA ADVANTAGES

Tizor's Mantra data monitoring and protection solutions are designed to ensure compliance and to protect sensitive data assets—such as financial, customer, and employee records—from unauthorized activity, including theft, abuse, and accidental mishandling.

Mantra's transparent appliance provides real-time monitoring, alerting, and reporting on all critical data, structured or unstructured, wherever it resides in the enterprise data center or the outsourced data center.  With Mantra's advanced analytics, enterprises get real-time insight into, and control over, all user activity directed at sensitive financial and other data assets.

Mantra advantages include:

Deploys Faster - Mantra makes it easy to deploy a database monitoring solution.  Every aspect of the product has been designed for ease of use, productivity and speed of deployment.  With Mantra, your project will be deployed faster and you will use fewer resources.

Real-time Insight - Mantra automatically discovers, reports, and alerts on data activity for data integrity, protection, and compliance.  Mantra provides pre-built and custom reports for SOX, other compliance initiatives, and data risk mitigation.

Scalability - Mantra's "plug and play" appliances can be inserted when and where they are needed at strategic locations in the enterprise switching fabric.  A Mantra appliance, because of its passive position in the network, co-exists easily with other data security policies, systems, tools, and controls.

Performance - Mantra was architected specifically to meet the high-performance requirements of the largest enterprise data centers.  Auditing over 50,000 transactions per second, with no dropped packets, Mantra captures all critical data activity with no impact on networkds, databases, or file systems.

Broadest Coverage - Mantra monitors structured data (Oracle, DB2 UDB, Sybase, and SQL Server databases) and unstructured data (Windows file servers) from a single platform.

Three-way Auditing - Network-based auditing and the option of either agent or agent-less local auditing creates a flexible SOX compliance solution that doesn't impact business systems or processes.

Patent-Pending Behavioral Fingerprinting® - Intelligent, behavior-based analytics identify anomalous and unauthorized user behavior to catch non-compliance, data theft, or misuse in real-time.

English-like Policy Language - Mantra comes with pre-defined SOX policies installed, but if custom policies are needed, they are easy to deploy, without the need for DBA or programming skills.

HOW IT WORKS

Mantra has been architected as a transparent network appliance that scales to meet the needs of the largest enterprise data center without impacting performance on production data servers or applications.  Mantra network monitoring requires local appliance setup only—no reconfiguration on production servers, software, network, or applications.  Mantra local auditing comes in two flavors: agent-based TAP local auditing or Mantra agent-less local auditing.  Multiple appliances deployed across multiple data centers can be inserted as needed anywhere in the network and managed from centrally.

Figure 2: Mantra Deployment

In many enterprises, critical data assets are scattered across numerous database servers, file servers, and mainframe systems—from a variety of vendors.  Mantra discovers, monitors, and audits network traffic to and from these diverse repositories of both structured and unstructured data.  Mantra offers the widest server platform coverage in the industry, supporting simultaneous data auditing across database and file servers from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM (open systems and mainframes), and Sybase—database, file server, and mainframe monitoring, all from a single appliance.

Designed specifically to meet the needs of the largest and most diverse data center environments, Tizor Mantra sets the standard for SOX 404 compliance and data protection solutions.