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We've always been impressed with Titania's Nipper Studio and PAWS Studio products, and TEC now brings them both under one roof and augments them with extensive reporting and alerting features.

TEC seamlessly integrates the technologies employed by Nipper and PAWS, allowing it to audit any network device. It supports a wide range of firewalls, switches and routers from all the major players, including Cisco, Brocade, Check Point, Fortinet, HP, Juniper and WatchGuard.

All Windows servers, workstations and laptops can be audited on-demand and to regular schedules, which can be often as every hour. In all cases, TEC produces an impressive range of professional compliance reports that can be easily searched and exported.

Deployment is swift and we had had the TEC VM template running on our VMware host in under 10 minutes. On first contact with its web console, we secured administrative access, added email addresses for alerting and configured the IP address of the TEC web server.

The web console's dashboard shows the status of all audit jobs, plus a compliance summary. The network monitoring pane to the right can be configured to show graphs and pie-charts for the various audits and compliance tests.

Our first job was to add devices and this can be done manually or via CSV files containing details such as device names, IP addresses and access credentials. Each device can be assigned an impact level rating that determines how critical it is to network operations.

We manually declared our Windows systems to TEC, along with the lab's HP ProCurve switches with SSH access defined. A separate page is provided for viewing all devices and these can be placed in custom groups for easier management.

To create audits, we chose a device group and decided which ones we wanted run. All systems and devices can be subjected to PCI-DSS, SANS and DISA STIG compliance audits, which can be run immediately or scheduled.

Network devices can have security audits run on them, along with configuration and vulnerability checks, while Windows systems are subjected to NSA, NERC and OVAL compliance and vulnerability checks. For Windows systems, a low footprint Data Collector agent is pushed to each one, which passes the relevant audit information back to the TEC server and then unloads itself.

Even a quick glance at the TEC report pages shows how sophisticated it is. These can be filtered by date and time, device name, audit type, profile, status and more, and TEC displays its finding in an easily understood table below.

Open ports, missing patches and service packs, firewall holes, weak passwords, compromised user accounts - they're all there - and each entry can be selected and viewed in more detail. Even better, TEC provides a clear overview of each vulnerability, its impact and easily understood remediation advice.

For our Windows domain controller, we could view reports of all user accounts, see when they last logged in and the number of times, plus failed logins along with their password expiry date. Usefully, all new entries in the TEC Findings page are highlighted with a green cross for easy identification and, during audit creation, we could define alert levels, so warnings were issued via email and to mobile devices using SMS.

Titania's TEC shows that compliance auditing doesn't have to be complicated. It's very easy to use and capable of providing a vast amount of easily understood audit information that'll ensure you stay on the right side of the laws governing data protection. CS

Product: TEC
Supplier: Titania Ltd
Telephone: +44 (0) 1905 888 785
Web site: www.titania.com