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Catbird, a specialist in security and compliance for virtual, cloud and physical networks, announced the next generation of its vSecurity platform, vSecurity 5.0, which integrates directly with the hypervisor to provide automated control, visibility and efficiency. Its vCompliance engine monitors and enforces virtualized data center compliance with PCI, the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other standards for regulated industries looking to tap into virtualized infrastructure for computing.
Catbird’s approach weaves together access control, intrusion detection, secure auditing and automated protection for virtual machines, virtual networks, hypervisor management and associated physical assets. With the release of vSecurity 5.0, Catbird incorporates features like an event viewer, which orchestrates and displays data culled from a range of controls, including nprobe, firewall, NAC, IDS/IPS and other sources, to paint a picture of what each control is detecting in real time. The event viewer provides analysis of the security posture of each asset, as well as the interrelationships between assets, to determine risks and vulnerabilities.
Also included is a compliance radar graph, a graphical gauge of a data center’s current compliance status against a particular standard that is automatically updated in real time. The compliance radar graph automates the validation of compliance while instantly alerting organizations to noncompliance, as well as automatic inventories of the IT environment to populate a comprehensive asset catalog for security monitoring and enforcement.
Other features include network flow mapping, which illustrates the communication paths between objects and groups of objects, providing a view of protocols, connections, access lists and more. Because the net flow mapping is integrated with Catbird’s automated inventory, organizations can more effectively regulate access controls and mitigate risks from suspicious communication.
Businesses can set policies and automatically administer and enforce those policies via vSecurity TrustZones, logical groupings of assets that share a predefined, common set of policy and compliance rules. In this way, IT teams can be assured of the compliance of their own virtualized data centers against third-party standards or their own corporate governance.
“Catbird vSecurity 5.0 gives us control over our entire virtual infrastructure and network, which is crucial to the security management of the whole county,” said Irvin Metaj, network engineer of Indiana’s Madison County Government Center, Information Technology Systems. “We manage IT for all branches of government: law enforcement, the courts, the revenue divisions and more. With Catbird, we know which departments are trying to access which network and systems, can manage who can communicate with whom and now patrol unauthorized connections. Catbird really raised our game by exposing us to best practices for virtualization security.”
Catbird’s vSecurity 5.0 is built on industry-standard, network-based security technologies for a set of services protecting virtual, cloud and physical networks. Catbird’s controls include IPS/IDS, network access control, vulnerability monitoring, compliance enforcement, policy management, configuration management and access control in a single solution. vSecurity 5.0 includes vCompliance for automated, real-time compliance monitoring and enforcement with integrated workflow and reporting; VMshield for monitoring and enforcing policies and rules on virtual machines to block malicious network activity directed at the specific asset from any source; and Hypervisor Shield for monitoring and controlling access, detecting malicious network activity and validating configurations of the hypervisor management network.
“Virtualization has revolutionized all aspects of data center computing, including security. With vSecurity 5.0, our customers benefit from the economic and technical advantages of virtualization,” said Edmundo Costa, CEO of Catbird. “From the U.S. Department of Defense to some of the largest credit card processors in North America, vSecurity automates the security and compliance process, enabling broader and deeper use of virtualization and cloud computing. Catbird customers can virtualize more assets, virtualize more quickly and improve virtualization ROI.”