Security Policy Monitoring Systems
Essentially, you're taking your policy statements and codifying them into a series of checks.
But even the most well-conceived policies will fail if the effectiveness of the program cannot be measured. How do you gauge the effectiveness of a firewall strategy or a VPN, IDS or antivirus deployment? More practically, how do you ensure that networked devices like desktops, servers, switches, routers and firewalls are configured properly? Absent tools that can provide a holistic view of the network, administrators are left to fumble along. Without measurements, you're blind.
The link for this article located at Network Computing is no longer available.