Active IQ helps you find and fix security vulnerabilities
Rip Wilson
You might have grown up in a time or place where the family car was left unlocked in the driveway. Or you didn’t have a password on your computer. Or your cellphone didn’t even have an option to lock it. Times have changed.
We now have doorbells with cameras, mandatory passwords, two-factor authentication, and even best practices for Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the home network (hint: Use your guest SSID). Security is a big deal — especially in corporate IT, and for good reason.
The ever-prevalent digital threats that span today’s landscape present an organization with unique challenges for protecting its most valuable asset: data. The advanced, dynamic threats and vulnerabilities that we face are constantly increasing in sophistication. System administrators must address the security of data in a proactive manner.
NetApp is an industry leader in developing products with the latest security standards and certifications. This leadership includes everything from encryption and authentication to best practices for protecting against ransomware.
One of the hardest areas in which to stay current — across industries and technologies — is security vulnerabilities. Exploitation of vulnerabilities can lead to disclosure of sensitive information, addition or modification of data, denial of service (DoS), or any number of other issues. Because new security vulnerabilities are discovered daily, it can be hard to know whether they affect your products and what actions you need to take.
The good news is that you have help: NetApp® Active IQ® Digital Advisor.
Think of Active IQ as your personal digital advisor. It makes your job easier by keeping an eye on your environment and providing clear, smart advice when action is needed. Fueled by telemetry data from our highly diverse customer base, Active IQ uses artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to create insights, guidance, and actions that will improve system availability, security, and health.
Active IQ is also your security advisor
Security is one of the core wellness categories for Active IQ, and it works relentlessly to uncover any potential risks. Active IQ looks through all the security advisories to figure out which ones apply to your environment, how critical they are, and whether any remediation actions are available. You can watch this video to see how Active IQ lets you know when you have a security risk and what to do to take care of it.Security vulnerabilities can often be mitigated with a firmware update, and Active IQ makes it easy. Active IQ figures out which systems need an update and then uses Ansible playbooks to automatically update drive, shelf, and service processor firmware for each of those systems. The playbooks are reusable, and firmware updates can become a routine step in your Ansible-based configuration management activities.
If risk mitigation requires a software upgrade, Active IQ can help out again. Active IQ will recommend a version, check interoperability, plan the upgrade process, and use community wisdom to show the effectiveness of the upgrade to remediate the security risk.
You can learn more about how our security policies, certifications, and guidelines can help you maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data on the NetApp Product Security webpage.
Rip Wilson
Rip Wilson is a principal product marketing manager at NetApp with over 20 years of experience developing compelling messaging and content that communicates our unique business value. Rip holds a degree in business management from Georgia Tech. He is based in Colorado and enjoys golf, tennis, and poker.
