SA Core and component security

Introduction to SA Core and Component Security Architecture

• SA can dramatically help improve the security of the typical data center. In particular, SA enables:
• Provisioning security-hardened server operating systems and application software consistently throughout all data centers.
• The introduction of stronger control and accountability across the data center environment; for example, by reducing the number of people who require administrator-level passwords on servers and the creation of digitally signed audit trails of tasks performed on a particular server.
• Automation of the ongoing configuration management challenges of maintaining strong security: identifying servers with missing patches, applying patches consistently, backing up configuration files when they change to enable easy rollback, and so on.

While the benefits of automating the data center are compelling, organizations need assurance that the automation system itself does not create the potential for new security vulnerabilities. With the ever-increasing sophistication of threats, both from within and external to organizations, it is absolutely mandatory to ensure that your automation software architecture has been designed with security as a primary consideration. SA has been designed with security as a primary consideration.

This section describes how SA uses the most up-to-date security best practices, intended for use in organizations with the most stringent security requirements and with the following design goals:

• Strict control and accountability: You can be confident that only authorized administrators can perform management actions, because SA enforces granular role-based access control and generates a digitally signed audit trail of account activity.
• Secure communication channels throughout the system: SA is a distributed computing environment in which individual components communicate with each other securely over an IP network. To accomplish this, SA uses SSL/TLS and X.509 certificates to secure the communication between these components.
• Automated delivery of compliance policies based on industry standards: SA provides an ongoing stream of immediately actionable compliance policies based on industry standards. The compliance policies leverage SA’s extensive audit and remediation capabilities around granular attributes such as installed patches, installed software, minimum password length, registry key settings, and even individual configuration settings within a file.