IBM Tivoli and Cisco manual Cisco Trust Agent, Security Compliance Manager client

Cisco Trust Agent

The Cisco Trust Agent is Cisco client software that is required to pass posture credentials and validation results between the Cisco NAC solution and the IBM Security Compliance Manager client.

Security Compliance Manager client

The Security Compliance Manager client is a software component that is physically installed on the network client. It is responsible for communicating with the Security Compliance Manager Server to keep the client’s policy up-to-date and to send collected compliance data to the server where it is stored in a database.

Security Compliance Manager policy

A Security Compliance Manager policy containing all of the collectors that will be run on the client is downloaded to clients and is the essential unit that performs most of the work on the client. Policies contain many collectors, each of which is responsible for collecting an explicit set of data.

Special posture collectors contain parameters that describe the required values for various data and remediation information to be provided to the remediation handler when collected values do not match required values.

A special policy collector gathers data from the various collectors and summarizes the collector data to provide version information (for example, software version of Security Compliance Manager client) and the number of policy violations to the Cisco Trust Agent client software. Communication between the Cisco Trust Agent client and Security Compliance Manager client is implemented using a plug-in developed by IBM.

Tip: A personal firewall and Host IDS running on the client systems are recommended for controlling traffic and alerting of intrusions on the client. The Cisco Security Agent provides endpoint server and desktop protection against new and emerging threats due to malicious network activity. The Cisco Security Agent identifies and prevents malicious behavior resulting in the elimination of known and unknown, or “Day Zero,” network threats. The Cisco Security Agent provides for the aggregation and extension of multiple endpoint security functions by providing intrusion prevention and distributed firewall capabilities in addition to malicious mobile code protection, system integrity assurance, and audit log consolidation. Read more about this product at:

http://www.cisco.com/go/csa

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