Catbird Opens European Headquarters to Help Datacenters Meet Compliance and Security Standards
SCOTTS VALLEY, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 17, 2013) - Catbird®, the pioneer in security and compliance for virtual, cloud and physical networks, today is announcing the next version of its award-winning Software-Defined Security solution vSecurity® 5.5. vSecurity 5.5 dramatically increases the broad compliance monitoring and enforcement capabilities of Catbird's flagship security solution, giving IT networking and security personnel in regulated software-defined datacenters the control and assurance they need to pass their audits confidently. The company is also announcing the establishment of its European HQ in the United Kingdom to be headed up by Pedro Beitra, whose previous roles include Senior Business Development Director at Citrix and CEO of VMCi.
Catbird vSecurity is a network-based Software-defined Security (SDS) solution, removing the need for expensive network security hardware to secure the virtual and cloud datacenter. vSecurity secures virtualized network components from within virtual infrastructure. Just as virtualization abstracts computing away from physical hardware, software-defined security untethers security from expensive single-purpose hardware security appliances, traditional models that have limited utility in software-defined datacenters. As a result, security is more adaptive, more agile and less expensive.
Security and compliance are increasingly critical requirements of enterprise virtualization and private cloud roll-outs. Traditional physical datacenter network security architectures are rigid and complex, limiting their effectiveness in software-defined datacenters, which are characterized by transience and mobility. Catbird's software-defined security tackles this problem with an innovative architecture, integrating security into the virtualized network itself. vSecurity is context-aware, adaptive and can be scaled to the size of the datacenter itself, requiring no more or no less security than what is actually needed.
"Virtualization and cloud-based data centers continue to expand in Europe. Catbird will have an essential role in accelerating this growth by ensuring the security of these deployments," noted Pedro Beitra, GM of Catbird Europe. "We think the market is ready to take secure virtualization to the next level."
"Accelerating the adoption of virtualized infrastructure and enabling IT to operate at cloud scale is one of the first steps in realizing the benefits of the software-defined datacenter," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "Catbird's integration of VMware vCloud Networking and Security™ with vSecurity 5.5 can accelerate the adoption of virtualized infrastructure in even the most sensitive of datacenters."
"With double the number of controls and compliance checks, Catbird vSecurity 5.5 is a game-changer for IT security managers and auditors looking to safely expand their virtualized datacenters to include mission-critical, regulated assets," said Edmundo Costa, Catbird CEO. "No other product orchestrates as broad a range of network security controls and compliance checks, purpose-built for software-defined datacenters. IT can now take full advantage of the benefits and cost savings of virtualization, without compromising on security or compliance."
With the introduction of advanced vulnerability monitoring as one of its core elements, vSecurity 5.5 monitors and enforces more controls than any other vendor for compliance with PCI, FISMA, NIST, HIPAA and other standards in virtualized datacenters. Vulnerability management joins a host of other existing security controls in vSecurity, including Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP), Network Segmentation and TrustZones®, Network Flow Mapping, Policy Establishment and Enforcement, Access Control and Firewalling (integrated with VMware vCloud Networking and Security™), and control orchestration and automation.
vSecurity 5.1 incorporates such new features as:
- Vulnerability and Configuration Management - Some of the main threats to a datacenter are known vulnerabilities -- flaws in a system or application that will impact security if exploited. Catbird vSecurity 5.5 automatically and continuously scans the virtualized network for these vulnerabilities, alerting, reporting and optionally quarantining assets where vulnerability is detected. The vulnerability management system also provides advanced features such as forensics and false positive management.
- Compliance Monitoring - Catbird vSecurity's vulnerability management system introduces many additional PCI Control checks, dramatically increasing coverage for PCI and other compliance frameworks. vSecurity 5.5 supplies "canned" policy configuration options related to PCI and other standards for 1-click compliance monitoring and enforcement.
- FIPS 140-2 Level 1 Certification - vSecurity 5.5 incorporates approved Federal Information Processing Standards encryption libraries. These libraries are required for federal government private cloud deployments.
- Vulnerability Trend Reporting - vSecurity 5.5 supplies a trending report for IT management to use in analysis of vulnerabilities in the virtualized datacenter. The report shows detected vulnerabilities, sorted by severity, over a given time period, demonstrating the effectiveness of vulnerability management to the security posture of the network.
- Scan Policy Management - vSecurity 5.5 gives IT security managers the ability to automatically set policy threshold configurations based on vulnerability criteria as defined by standards such as MITRE's Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and NIST's Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Security operators are able to set alerting and quarantine thresholds using the values of discovered vulnerabilities expressed in terms of CVE and CVSS.
Catbird vSecurity 5.5 is available immediately. The company will be demonstrating the product at the Infosecurity Europe trade show next week in London, at booth K78. To download a free evaluation version of vSecurity, go to http://www.catbird.com/demo. To learn more about Catbird's industry-leading, comprehensive security solutions for virtual and cloud environments, visit http://www.catbird.com. Follow Catbird on Twitter at @CatbirdSecurity, or Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/catbirdsecurevirtualization.
About Catbird (www.catbird.com)Catbird is the industry leader in software-defined security -- comprehensive security and compliance for virtualized, cloud and physical environments. Catbird is a winner of four Best of Show Finalist Awards at VMworld and SC Magazine's "Innovator of the Year 2011" for virtualization security. Via Catbird vSecurity, Catbird is the only company delivering best-practice software-defined security and compliance for the new datacenter. As companies migrate mainstream servers and desktops to virtual environments, uncertainty over security and compliance can impact deployment plans. Catbird's protection eliminates these worries and keeps virtualization plans on track.
VMware, VMware vCloud Networking and Security and VMware vCloud are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.