by Josh Arrington
Microsoft TechEd North America 2011—an international conference that draws IT developers and professionals from around the globe and encourages engagement and collaboration with Microsoft innovators, third party leaders and industry peers—is now in full swing at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Cyber-Ark will be on hand to demonstrate the advantages of its Privileged Identity Management Suite as well as the advanced auto-discovery functionality for automating the detection process of all forms of privileged accounts, including the service accounts commonly associated with Microsoft Windows Services. To join the conversation surrounding the event, we decided to check in with one of our partners—Avecto, a pioneer in least privilege technology that enables organizations to deploy secure and compliant desktops—to see what they have planned for the show and beyond.
Read on for our brief Q&A with Paul Kenyon, Co-Founder and COO at Avecto:
CyberArk: What does the Avecto team have in store for attendees and followers of TechEd 2011? Any new technologies and products you anticipate will generate a good deal of buzz at the show?
Paul: Avecto will be demonstrating the latest release of our privilege management product, Privilege Guard 2.7. Amongst the various new features in the product we have significantly increased the integration with Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC). We see UAC as a great solution for true administrators and home users, but felt that there was some functionality lacking for corporate environments. In Privilege Guard 2.7 we have filled that gap to make Windows 7 migrations simpler and more secure. Already, Privilege Guard has received the Windows 7 compatibility accreditation, and the product is a snap in to Group Policy and WinRM (a standard feature in Windows 7) for centralizing our events. Specifically, what we have tried to do is avoid making our customers invest in additional architecture to obtain the benefits we provide—and we anticipate this will be received warmly at TechEd.
Cyber-Ark: Last year, Avecto and Cyber-Ark officially announced a strategic partnership to enable the resale of Avecto’s Privilege Guard products to Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite customers. Can you share some milestones from this partnership in terms of evolving market demand and customer traction, even anecdotally?
Paul: Well to start, the relationship began with a meeting between myself and Udi Mokady, in Ireland, last year. I had suffered for a fall from my Mountain Bike so was looking a little worse for wear, but needless to say, I didn’t want to miss the chance to get together with Udi whilst it was geographically so convenient to meet. It was at that meeting that it became clear that the synergy between our two companies was too great to pass up on the opportunity to partner.
Naturally these things take time to hatch but once all the paperwork had been completed and the partnership launched internally we started to see considerable customer interest arise. Only yesterday I spoke with a prospect who is looking at both our products and was keen to make me aware of the value of purchasing technologies that he knows are compliant with one another from day one.
Cyber-Ark: With security, and IT in general, the focus always seems to be on “What’s Next?” With that in mind, how do you foresee enterprise security practices and technologies, both on-premise and in the cloud, evolving come TechEd 2012?
Paul: Most of the organizations we have spoken to are saying similar things; they have invested in anti-virus, firewalls, intrusion prevention and various other technologies at the perimeter but now they want to further secure desktop and servers inside the network. More than that, we have seen the increasing demand on CISO’s to improve customer satisfaction which means that they need to implement technology that improves the security of the business but not directly at the expense of user flexibility.
