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Through security maintenance, an organization can proactively
manage the security of its systems. The importance of regular system
maintenance should not be underestimated. Good, timely maintenance
procedures can keep your systems running at optimum performance.
Avaya recommends that you implement proper maintenance procedures
in accordance with your corporate security policies and guidelines.
See system maintenance for more information
on Message Networking maintenance procedures.
Who is responsible?
You must define who is responsible for maintaining the security
of your system. Security information must be distributed throughout
the organization. It is the role of the information security department
to communicate and validate that systems are being maintained. It
is the role of the systems administrator to test and apply patches
and maintain the security of the system.
If the security department is given the role of maintaining security,
and validating and communicating security policy, then
a conflict of interest would exist because the auditor and validator
would also be the maintainer. Security staffs are often faced with
limited personnel. It would be an impossible task for many security
departments to take on the responsibility of maintaining system
security throughout the enterprise. The task of maintenance needs
to be distributed to all the system and application administrators.
It is job of the security department to communicate and train the
system administrators to secure systems according to the security
policies, standards, and procedures of the organization.
Following are some of the general guidelines for defining a security
maintenance program for your system:
Systems Backups
Backups are necessary to ensure that
critical system data can be recovered in-case of an emergency or
a system failure. As part of system maintenance activities, it is
important that you do the following:
Maintain and review activity logs and store them in a secure location.
Activity logs can be used to trace system activity and errors.
Monitoring and alarming
System monitoring involves ongoing review of system reports and
audits of the system and its logs. Review the security configuration
on the system regularly to validate that changes made through maintenance
do not weaken system security. It is also advisable to scan your
system for vulnerabilities on a regular basis.
Message Networking supports a variety of security monitoring features.
Web sessions are automatically disconnected after a period of inactivity.
Accounts are automatically locked out for a period of time as a
consequence of consecutive failed login attempts. All failed attempts
to login are also logged for tracking user and administration activities.
Security-related, critical events are reported in a maintenance
alarm, which is called out to an Avaya Maintenance Center through
an analog telephone call. See Overview
of Message Networking logs for more information on the logs
generated by the system.
Security Audits
You can conduct a security audit of your system on a quarterly
or an annual basis, as defined in your corporate security policies.
Ensure that the security audit addresses the following components:
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Application security. A secure operating environment can be
compromised by using an insecure application.
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Third-party application security. Ideally there should be no
third-party applications running on the Message Networking system.
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Content. Review the security of the contents on the system.
Often you need to address the security of items, such as passwords
stored in HTML files.
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Network security. Review the security configuration of your
network on a regular basis.
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