Robin Wauters

Catbird today announced the immediate availability of vCompliance, a 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, 24×7, 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.

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

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.

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.