IBM i Security and MFA Software

Which access and auditing gaps are most common in mature IBM i environments?

The most common gaps are shared or rarely reviewed privileged accounts, weak visibility into special authority use, inconsistent exit point controls, incomplete alerting, and audit logs that exist but are not turned into actionable review routines. Mature environments often look stable right up until someone asks for evidence of who can do what and when that access was last reviewed.

Answer

Shared privileged accounts are usually the oldest problem in the environment. A profile like QSECOFR or a homegrown "admin" user profile gets used by three or four people over the years because it is faster than provisioning individual *SECADM or *ALLOBJ authority, and by the time anyone tries to trace an action back to a person, the trail is gone. The fix is not just disabling the shared profile; it is building a provisioning process that grants individual special authorities matched to actual job duties, then reviewing that list on a schedule instead of only when an auditor asks.

Exit points are the second recurring gap. IBM i ships with exit points for FTP, ODBC, remote command, and other network access methods, but unless a security product or custom program registers against them, activity through those paths goes largely unmonitored even though QAUDJRN may be capturing object-level events. Buyers should ask how a candidate platform covers exit point registration out of the box versus how much custom exit program work is required. On alerting, the practical question is whether the software surfaces a small number of meaningful events, such as a profile gaining *ALLOBJ authority or a new user in a QSECOFR-class group, rather than flooding the security team with noise that gets filtered out and ignored within a month.

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