Catbird, the pioneer in leading-edge security and compliance solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, today announced the immediate availability of vCompliance™, the industry’s first comprehensive automated monitoring and enforcement solution that ensures security and regulatory compliance for virtualized and cloud-based data centers. Based on Catbird’s vSecurity® platform, vCompliance’s real-time continuous monitoring service instantly detects compliance violations and quarantines offending assets to ensure ongoing compliance with leading regulatory standards, such as DIACAP, SOX, HIPAA and PCI.
With the increasing presence of VMware virtualization in regulated industries such as financial services, government, retail and healthcare, comes the attendant need to ensure that these deployments meet or exceed existing compliance requirements. vCompliance is designed specifically for these environments. It unites an automated, 24x7, network monitoring service with information from the hypervisor, including a full vulnerability management solution and network access control. These critical services are mandated by regulatory specifications. Catbird vCompliance provides numerous controls required by the leading regulatory standards organizations and the most common security frameworks.
“Maintaining compliance is the #1 concern facing security officers at enterprises moving to virtualized data centers,” said Edmundo Costa, Catbird COO. “Most regulatory bodies are beginning to update their specs to incorporate virtualization, and the absence of a single authoritative resource to guide IT security and operations professionals in achieving compliance has led to spotty enforcement and glaring gaps. vCompliance fills this void to ensure worry-free ongoing compliance, complete with automatic updates to the latest standards.”
“Virtualization is becoming increasingly present in datacenters where compliance is non-negotiable,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances, VMware. “To meet this growing demand, VMware works with partners such as Catbird to enable complementary solutions that take advantage of VMware virtualization to ensure compliance in a simplified, cost-effective yet more comprehensive way — providing customers with even better compliance than they could achieve with purely physical infrastructure.”
Finally, Compliance that Enhances Virtualization’s Appeal
Catbird vCompliance can actually make virtualized assets more compliant than physical, providing yet another incentive for businesses to move to cloud-based and virtualized environments, in addition to the inherent cost savings and provisioning ease. Designed for deployment as a cloud-based service, vCompliance provides a comprehensive and integrated virtualized compliance product, including:
Continuous and automated audit and enforcement to meet the requirements of PCI, HIPAA, SOX, DIACAP, etc.
Policy driven automated controls for auditing, inventory management, configuration management, change management, access control, vulnerability management, and incident response
Vulnerability scanning from inside the virtual subnets, with 100% visibility of all virtual machines
Automated enforcement and quarantine of out of compliance assets
Detailed statistics on compliance status for each individual asset, zone, virtual host or physical host
Automated, customizable reports (per compliance specification, per asset or per zone) geared for the appropriate organizational audience (management, operations, etc.) that provide a quick overview or deep-dive to help resolve compliance issues, ease remediation and restore full compliance
Web-based management
Integrated Compliance Management & Reporting Through VMware vSphere™ 4 and VMware vCenter™ Product Family
Via Catbird’s integrated security control console, Catbird vCompliance provides a compliance view of virtual systems in the vSphere management application. This integration brings real-time visibility and management of virtual and cloud security to a single web-based management interface, accessible from anywhere. The drag-and-drop dashboard supports automated discovery and hyperlink drill-down for intuitive management and ease of use. The multi-tenant portal provides more flexible administration options to meet the needs of multi-departmental organizations and service providers.
Seamlessly incorporated into the VMware vSphere™ 4 and VMware vCenter™ management workflow, VMware administrators can instantly monitor system compliance against standard or customized policies defined by corporate security or governance. Continuous status updates are delivered to the VMware vCenter console by “Catbirds” – stateless, non-invasive appliances deployed on the virtual subnets which act as the eyes and ears of the virtual environment.
In the event of an attempted policy violation, designated personnel are instantly alerted via an array of mechanisms and the offending activity blocked -- preventing a compromise of the integrity and compliance of the system. Detailed reporting, accessible directly from the console, provides automated event logs to ease troubleshooting and remediation.
Superbly Compatible for Exceptional Performance, Reliability
vCompliance is specifically designed to enhance overall data center performance with a minimal footprint and a flexible, fully XML and Web-services based architecture that allows for seamless integration with 3rd party reporting tools, trouble-ticketing and other enterprise-class services in a heterogeneous environment. In addition, Catbird is integrated with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management console, providing customers with a single administrative interface for both virtual and physical security, and both network and end-point security.
"Our government and enterprise clients face regulatory pressure everyday from external and internal auditors," noted Adnan Hindi, COO of Catbird partner Palladian Technology. "With Catbird vCompliance, these customers can seamlessly deploy virtualization technology without compromising any of their established policies or 3rd party regulations, enabling a quick and easy shift to their virtualized data centers. We haven't seen any other product in the market with the depth and breadth of coverage that Catbird has."
“Catbird’s underlying technology is the most dependable and respected in the industry, relied on by hundreds of customers across some of the country’s largest Managed Security Services Providers to provide security and compliance for their customers,” Costa said. “Given the high cost of audits and financial damage that can result from a breach, ensuring ongoing compliance with an easy-to-deploy mechanism such as vCompliance can deliver a considerable ROI, along with peace of mind.”
