The addition of more intuitive GUI is expected to lead to better coordination of the processes managed through the central control system. Global Command Center is built around a quartet of management modules for configuration management tasks such as policy control, VPN modeling and role-based administration, security event management, log management duties like collection and storage of reports, and patch and license management.

Central security policy systems like Global Command Center are intended for the eventual control of the entire security infrastructure. Currently they are good at management of security products from a vendor’s own product portfoio, however.

Mike Wittig President and CTO of CyberGuard confirmed that Version 3 is designed to integrate more fully with the company’s own product line, which has been added to through by acquisition. We wanted to add support for the acquired Webwasher secure content management product and other CyberGuard products. That was a priority.

For instance, the vendor’s TSP, Total Stream Protection appliances was not supported by Global Command Center at first. Announced last year, the appliance line saw CyberGuard abandon SCO Group Inc’s Unixware 2.3 operating system for CG Linux, a new custom-made hardened Linux based on Red Hat 8 and the 2.4 kernel. Part of the product development road map will also lead us to look closely at building links to some third-party product he added.

The ultimate aim for such policy control systems is in providing a 360 degree view of all network activity. Administrators could drill down into alerts to view the associated network events and generate reports to perform forensic analysis. The aim is for a single managed environment where the security policy extends out to the edge and the rules can be enforced in an orchestrated fashion.

An administrator using the new Global Command Center system can define objects for a firewall or firewall groups, endpoint groups or networks once and re-use them as needed either as is or in a modified format so that they are instantly propagate changes enterprise-wide. But for the moment, only across Cyberguard security systems.

Global Command Center 3.0 will become available later this quarter.