What is FMOS?

The FireMon Operating System (FMOS) is a managed operating system. It is designed exclusively to support the FireMon Security Intelligence Platform software suite. It provides all of the necessary utilities to deploy, configure, use, and troubleshoot the Security Intelligence Platform (SIP) and its related modules in a wide array of scenarios and environments.

Why FMOS?

To ensure all FireMon customers have a consistent experience when using FireMon software, FMOS does not allow any users, including users with the FMOS Administrator privilege, to make direct changes to any operating system or application configuration. FMOS provides an extensive set of configuration options itself, which can be used to customize the FireMon software, the operating system, and third-party software included in FMOS. The FireMon development team has evaluated these configuration options and tests them for compatibility in a range of scenarios to identify and eliminate issues and potential issues.

FMOS manages configuration files, kernel parameters, security options, user accounts, and more. In addition to ensuring a consistent user experience and helping administrators avoid misconfiguration, this approach has powerful security benefits. Limiting users’ access to prescribed operations shrinks the attack surface area of the system dramatically.

Operating system security updates are provided by FireMon as part of our regular software releases. With each release, the operating system package set is fully tested for compatibility with our products – quality assurance that an administrator running SIP software on a different Linux platform would have to do on their own.

As the FireMon Security Intelligence Platform module suite grows and evolves, so does FMOS. Each release of FMOS includes additional functionality to simplify deployments, increase security, or solve problems.

Notes

  • Our products (all SIP modules) interact with firewalls using machine-to-machine communication.

  • We offer FIPS 140-2 compliant algorithms.

    • Customers requiring FIPS-based cryptography modules will need to contact Support for the FIPS-compliant version, and will need to install or backup-fresh install-restore.