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Two months after unveiling a host of new virtualization management solutions at their CA World 2010 show, company officials are now releasing the offerings.
CA Technologies on July 19 announced the general release of four products in the CA Virtual portfolio that were talked about at the event in May, as well as a fifth offering, CA Virtual Privilege Manager, which is the latest addition to the family.
Given the growth of virtualized data center environments-particularly in private cloud computing settings-getting users access to the applications and workloads that they need while ensuring the security of everything else running in the cloud is crucial, according to Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing at CA.
“The question is, how do you provide privileged users the access to get their work done without giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Mann said in an interview with eWEEK.
This issue comes as the use of virtualization grows. Businesses are looking for ways to streamline their operations, become more efficient and drive down operating and capital costs, but the use of virtualization also increases the need for security. In March, Gartner analysts said that through 2012, 60 percent of all virtual servers will be less secure than the physical ones they’re replacing.
Products such as CA’s Virtual Privilege Manager are designed to combat the issue. Through capabilities such as privileged user password management, administrative access controls and the monitoring of original user activity, the software is designed to secure console access to the hypervisor and manage the access privileges to the applications running on the virtual machine and service console.
“With this, [users] get access to what they need, but not everything,” Mann said.
CA officials used their CA World 2010 show in May to roll out a broad portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions, including CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration and CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers.
CA officials are looking to rapidly expand the management capabilities of IT administrators for their virtualized and private cloud environments.
Mann said these latest products won’t be the last as the company expands its virtual and cloud management family of products.
“We’re getting there and building up a pretty strong portfolio,” he said.