Justifying Trusted Solaris

Hola!

For many years now, my organization has been a loyal Solaris customer. And while we still have issues with the default setup we have been able to get by with information from the blueprint articles and the tools (a big thanks to Alex Noordergraaf, Keith Watson, and Glenn Brunette!). In fact, we recently overhauled our data center operational and deployment security standards based on this information.

However, we feel that even with the measures we have taken Solaris is still not adequate to defend against an unhappy insider or a determined hacker. I have been inestigating whether Trusted Soalris should be our OS of choice for key systems (NIS/LDAP, DB, financial). It seems that the muliti-level security is what we need but the configuration complexity perhaps is too great. Let me give the situation. A good sysadmin is hard to find and harder to keep. Clearly, we need to train our sysadmins for Trusted because no one we have is familiar with it. A colleague of mine at another company tried Trusted and told me that initial config is very difficult. We know that Trusted Solaris 8 has Sun management console(SMC?), but frankly we hate it on Solaris 8!

How can I go to my management and ask for money (especially now) to train sysadmins in Trusted Solaris? I need ammo. I can make a good case for the security benefits but not for additional training costs. Also the documentation for Trusted Solaris on docs.sun.com and the Sun Education cleass on Trusted Solaris appear to be geared for the governement/militray. Are there any books or articles on using Trusted Solaris in data center environements?

Please help.

Bobby Flay

[1688 byte] By [] at [2007-11-25 23:04:11]