NEWTON, Mass. – October 26, 2011 – CyberArk® Software, the leading global information security provider for protecting and managing critical applications, identities and sensitive information, today announced it has extended its auto-discovery capabilities for proactively detecting privileged accounts within virtualized environments. This highly scalable, first-of-its kind capability to support security and compliance priorities across the data center is just one of several operational and efficiency-focused enhancements available in version 7 of Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite, which was just announced from the company’s Annual North American Customer Event in Las Vegas.
Greater adoption of virtualized technology across the data center continues to drive operational and cost benefits. However, that adoption also leads to exponential security and risk specifically related to the rapid provisioning of new virtual machines, and managing and monitoring related privileged access and activity. Additionally, organizations need to continue to be acutely aware of the risks of attacks targeting hypervisor privileged accounts, given their massive, high-level access to potentially thousands of virtualized servers, databases and applications. To provide data centers with a more scalable, proactive security solution that spans privileged account lifecycle management across virtualized devices, Cyber-Ark is pioneering the delivery of innovative, preventative, enterprise-class virtualization security solutions.
Auto-Detection of Privileged Accounts for Improved Virtual Data Center Security
The newest version of Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite automatically secures, manages and logs all privileged accounts and usages associated with data center management. With its industry leading auto-detection capabilities for virtualized environments, Cyber-Ark enables data center administrators with a systematic, scalable approach to:
- Automatically provision and deprovision VMware ESX/ESXi and vCenter privileged, root and shared accounts
- Protect the privileged credentials in a highly secure, tamper-proof Digital Vault
- Enforce security policies such as periodic replacement of all privileged credentials of the hypervisor and guest images
- Enforce change-management approval procedures as part of emergency access and system maintenance workflows
Cyber-Ark’s auto-discovery feature and the ability to simplify management across the privileged account lifecycle in frequently changing virtualized environments empower organizations to create a unified accountability and control point over privileged accounts. The solution improves operational efficiency by automating privileged credential management and supports audit and compliance requirements with detailed logging of activities – processes that would be nearly impossible to accomplish manually.
Operational Efficiency and Business Continuity
Additional highlights from version 7 of Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite include:
- Enhanced Managerial Dashboard for Operational Efficiency and Rapid Issues Resolution – New features were built to provide actionable insight across Account, Operational and personalized user views for quicker access, improved usability and greater operational efficiency. Users can monitor privileged account usage via the web-based managerial dashboard and built-in audit, compliance and operational reports for tracking who used the privileged account, when and for what reason.
- Improved Enterprise Integration – Additional enhancements facilitate continuity of service and high system availability during upgrades and deployment. Organizations benefit from intuitive set-up wizards to smooth out-of-box integration with Directories and Email servers for alerting and reporting.
“The sheer effort associated with managing large numbers of privileged accounts across a virtualized environment can create significant challenges and acute security risk if organizations are not using a proactive, programmatic approach, ” said Roy Adar, vice president of product management, Cyber-Ark Software. “With this version of our Privileged Identity Management Suite, Cyber-Ark is providing customers with a preventative and highly automated solution for managing, monitoring and controlling privileged accounts – both known and unknown – within their virtual data centers. This single enterprise-class solution will not only improve security, but also operational efficiency and security policy compliance.”
Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite includes three products: Enterprise Password Vault® for privileged account lifecycle management; Application Identity Manager™ for eliminating hard-coded, embedded credentials and encryption keys stored in applications, scripts or configuration files; and On-Demand Privileges Manager™ for on-demand root elevation and granular access control on Unix/Linux environments as well as implementing a least privilege policy in Windows environments.
