Benefits of Adopting OVAL
Deploying products and services that have adopted OVAL benefit organizations working to secure their enterprises, and providing products that implement OVAL benefits the vendors that help them do it.
Benefits of Using Products and Services that have Adopted OVAL
- Adoption provides a method for consistent and reproducible information assurance metrics from your systems.
- Adoption lets you know definitively that your network security products and services are interoperable and hence work together to protect your enterprise.
- Use of OVAL Definitions in the products and services provides you with confidence that the issues being tested are actually present on the system (with fewer false positives).
- Adoption/Validation ensures that tools have undergone some amount of testing to meet the requirements.
- The Adoption process is well documented and open, thus providing users with details about the tool᾿s OVAL implementation.
- Adoption provides vendors with something that distinguishes them from competition, thus encouraging adoption through the industry.
- Adoption provides users with a standard against which to measure tools when making purchasing decisions.
Benefits for Vendors Integrating OVAL into their Products and Services
- Customers want products and services that can work together, and adoption enables interoperability.
- Adoption signifies your organization incorporates community standards that benefit your customers.
- Gain a competitive edge over companies that aren᾿t participating.
- OVAL᾿s standardized baseline data allows you to focus your R&D on the advanced and higher-level aspects of your product, increasing ROI.
- Standardized OVAL data can be used as a second level of assessment to your proprietary methods and offered as a product enhancement.
- Incorporating standardized OVAL Definitions that test for software vulnerabilities, compliance issues, programs, and patches could serve as enhancements to your existing products or services, or as the foundation of new ones.
- Leverage existing OVAL content that has been produced by software vendors that are OVAL Adopters and the OVAL Repository.
- Use of the OVAL Adopter logo on your Web site, product packaging, etc., serves as a purchase incentive for prospective customers, informing them that your product/service is certified as officially compatible with a growing industry.
To begin the declaration process, send an email to oval@mitre.org requesting a Declaration Form along with your company name, contact information, the type of product, and the name of the product or service. You will receive specific instructions for completing and submitting additional information as the process continues.
Page Last Updated: May 31, 2013
