Qualys Announces QualysGuard Policy Compliance 2.0

New Release Delivers Open APIs, Comprehensive Technology Coverage, Customized Controls with New Advanced Reporting and Search Capabilities.

New and upgraded Policy Compliance 2.0 features and customer benefits include:

• Open APIs–XML extensible interface allows customers and GRC vendors to programmatically query security and compliance data of systems in scope for compliance initiatives.
• Comprehensive Control Coverage–Due to overwhelming demand, Qualys has been actively involved in receiving and responding to new control requests for current and new technologies. Policy Compliance 2.0 spans multiple operating systems and applications used within the enterprise with mappings to popular compliance frameworks and regulations.
• Trending and Compliance Charts–Many security and compliance tools only show snapshots of compliance at a single point in time, whereas Policy Compliance 2.0 enables compliance and security managers to monitor the ongoing effectiveness of their programs with detailed trend reports.
• Control Cross Reference–IT auditors need to know which compliance configuration and security policies are in effect and what mitigating procedures are initiated when violations occur. Policy Compliance 2.0 includes the ability to 'link' to external content via hyperlink or textual reference, compliance and security personnel can navigate to the appropriate corporate approved mitigating procedure right from the Qualys interface.
• User Defined Controls for Registry Values and ACL’s–Qualys is developing a series of User Defined Controls or UDC’s that enable users to create their own controls dynamically, as needed, without having to submit control requests to Qualys development. Starting with the registry, users can create controls for expected registry values and ACL’s. 
• Search and Performance Improvements–By providing a modular approach to security policy creation, Qualys enables customers to build security policies in QualysGuard that are mapped to existing hardened documents already being used in the customer’s IT infrastructure.  To ease identification of matching controls, Qualys has built-in additional search functionality to better enable customers to locate the controls they need.

QualysGuard Policy Compliance 2.0 is available as part of the QualysGuard Security and Compliance Suite on May 26, 2009. QualysGuard annual subscriptions are based on the number of systems scanned and include unlimited number of scans and 24×7 support and updates.

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