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Titania PAWS Studio 2.4.4

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 11-2015    Views: 3993   









SMBs that want to show compliance with data protection regulations will like Titania's PAWS Studio a lot

Capable of auditing any Windows or Linux system, it offers an impressive range of highly detailed compliance reports and all at a very affordable price.

With costs as low as £2 per device, it beats most enterprise solutions hands-down for value. PAWS Studio doesn't compromise on features either, as it comes with predefined policies for all the major compliance regulations and provides a policy editor, so you can easily create your own.

The latest version introduces a range of new features with existing policies for PCI-DSS, SANS, NSA, NERC and STIG, complimented with two extra ones for OVAL (Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language). These are important, as they give PAWS Studio new powers to scan for system vulnerabilities, as well as compliance.

Titania has added a converter tool, so you can download the latest DISA STIG compliance files and OVAL vulnerability repositories, and update PAWS Studio with them. There's more, as the new configuration report provides detailed hardware and software inventory for each audited system.

The PAWS Studio console also gets a design refresh, making it even easier to create and run audits. The first step is to choose local and remote target systems, and options are provided to manually add a device, run a network discovery routine or scan an IP address range.

We could select single or multiple systems from the list and apply a set of universal authentication credentials. The next step is to choose any or all available reports and leave PAWS Studio to generate them.

Leaving no footprint, it pushes a Data Collector to each system, which gathers the requested information and sends it back to the host for report creation. You can also export the Data Collector tool, along with the required audit policies, run it directly on a system and import the results back into the PAWS Studio host.

Along with our Windows 7 host, we ran audits of the lab's Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controller, plus Exchange 2013 and SQL Server 2014 hosts. Report generation is fast, with a combined NSA, PCI-DSS and OVAL audit on our Exchange 2013 system taking a mere 12 seconds.

On completion, PAWS Studio displayed the report for our approval, which can then be saved in a variety of formats, including HTML and PDF. The viewer also provides tools to customise the report where we could change the title, add our company logo, decide which files to display and then regenerate it.

The reports are highly detailed and the information presented is very accessible. They provide clear descriptions and impact assessments for each compliance check, so widening their appeal from technician to board member.

We could see clearly which compliance checks had failed and the reports provided sage advice on remedial action. User access security is always a critical area and, for our AD controller, we could view the status of all domain accounts, passwords policies etc and see those that needed action.

Windows update and patch status are checked and verified, along with the status of essential anti-virus software. We found the system inventories to be very accurate, with PAWS Studio correctly identifying installed OSes, CPUs, used and available memory and hard disk space, installed software and much more.

SMBs handling sensitive or personal data can't make light of regulatory compliance, as it will mean the difference between success and failure. PAWS Studio is an ideal auditing solution, as it provides highly detailed and comprehensible reports covering all the major compliance policies, and is remarkably good value.

Product: PAWS Studio 2.4.4
Supplier: Titania Ltd
Telephone: +44 (0)1905 888785
Web site: www.titania.com
Price: From £12 to £2 per device (exc. VAT)

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