Benefits of OVAL Compatibility — Archive
Important: The OVAL Compatibility Program was moved to "archive" status in December 2009, and replaced with the "OVAL Adoption Program." Under the OVAL Adoption Program product validation is performed by an external organization, allowing the OVAL Team to focus on educating vendors on best practices regarding the use and implementation OVAL and on how OVAL can continue to evolve as needed by the community.
Refer to the OVAL Adoption Program section for addition information and to review all products and services listed.
Adopting OVAL-compatible products and services benefit organizations working to secure their enterprises, and providing compatible products benefits the vendors that help them do it.
Benefits of Using OVAL-Compatible Products and Services
- Compatibility provides a method for consistent and reproducible information assurance metrics from your systems.
- Compatibility 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 compatible products and services provides you with confidence that the issues being tested are actually present on the system (with fewer false positives).
- Compatibility ensures that tools have undergone some amount of testing to meet the requirements.
- The compatibility process is well documented and open, thus providing users with details about the tools OVAL implementation.
- Compatibility provides vendors with something that distinguishes them from competition, thus encouraging compatibility through the industry.
- Compatibility 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 compatibility enables interoperability.
- Compatibility signifies your organization incorporates community standards that benefit your customers.
- Gain a competitive edge over companies that arent participating.
- GaOVALs 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 OVAL-Compatible software vendors and the OVAL Repository.
- Use of the OVAL-Compatible 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
Page Last Updated: December 17, 2009
