Extend IBM Cloud Security Advisor with your own security metrics

Custom findings in Security Advisor

The IBM Cloud Security Advisor allows for centralized security management. It offers a unified dashboard that alerts security administrators for an IBM Cloud account of issues and helps them in resolving the issues. The advisor supports the integration of third-party vendors as well as custom findings. Using a REST API or programming language SDKs, it is possible to manage your own security metrics - from creating incident types and events to displaying them on the unified dashboard. In this and a follow-up post, I am going to give you a quick introduction to the Security Advisor and then discuss the code I made available on GitHub in the repo security-advisor-findings. It simplifies to management of custom objects and provides functions for some of my security scans.

Swashbooking for crowd-sourced book reviews and fun

Books for review

Usually, I don't go to book clubs or write book reviews. But yesterday evening was different with my first swashbooking session (German: Buchstrudeln). It is fast-paced book skimming and crowd-sourced book review combined. And a lot of fun. So what is it and what really did we do? Read on...

25th meeting of German Db2 User Group

Celebrating the 25th DeDUG meeting

Last Friday, the 25th meeting of the German Db2 User Group was held, this time hosted by Fiducia & GAD IT AG in Karlsruhe. As usual, it was both a great networking and informative event. I had the opportunity to catch up with many Db2 users - customers, partner and IBMers. Moreover, similar to a couple of previous meetings, I had the after-lunch talk, this time featuring Db2 on Cloud security topics.

Use an API KEY or ACCESS TOKEN to connect to Db2 on IBM Cloud

In the past, I have blogged about how to access a Db2 database on IBM Cloud from your local machine. I cataloged the cloud host and its database. Then, connected to it using the command line processor (CLP) by passing a username and password. Last year, I was delighted to read that Db2 on Cloud and Db2 Warehouse on Cloud now support authentication by either IBMid, API key, or access token. It is called IAM (Identity and Access Management) support. Finally, I had some time to actually use it. Here is what steps I needed to connect from my local machine to Db2 on IBM Cloud using either API key or token.