Business Solutions
An Innovative Approach to Virtualization Security
The ChallengeWith the deployment of virtualization spreading throughout the datacenter, how you manage security, risk and specifically privileged access and activity on the virtual environments is a major area of concern. Hypervisor administrators are highly privileged with much wider system access than a regular IT administrator; as such the risk becomes exponential if a Hypervisor privileged account is compromised either by an insider or by an external targeted attack.
Although virtual environments offer the benefits of cost savings, consolidated resource pools on highly available machines and a more efficient IT workforce, the fact that an administrator can provision a new virtual machine in no time and restart or dynamically move a virtual machine to another physical host in seconds means there could be serious violations of your security policies and you are much more prone to human errors.
By automating privileged account management and monitoring privileged activities you can safely overcome the security concerns of your virtualized environments.
The Solution
Cyber-Ark's Privileged Identity Management Suite and Privileged Session Management Suite are two complementary suites that create a central command and control point for all privileged access and activity in your datacenter or virtual environment.
With Privileged Identity Management Suite you can:
- Automatically discover when a new virtualized machine is being added/removed, including Windows/UNIX/Linux guests and ESX hosts and then go on to automatically manage the privileged accounts
- Control access to hypervisors, vCenter, ESX & Guest Machines, managing who can administer what on a virtualized machine and the level of access they are entitled to
- Personalize administrator access and track usage
- Automatically enforce pre-defined security policies for credential management
- Enforce change management approval procedures
With Privileged Session Management Suite you can:
- Monitor VM admin tools including vCenter, ESX/ESXi hosts and Guest Machines with zero footprint on the sensitive hypervisor
- Control privileged sessions with access and approval workflows and policies
- Full administrative session recording with DVR style playback
- Isolate privileged sessions against targeted attacks with a proxy-based solution
- Enable strong authentication to hypervisor
- Privileged single sign on across the virtual environment, without exposing the sensitive credentials
Automatically provision vCenter, ESX or Windows/*nix root accounts
and monitor privileged activity
Benefits
- Minimize insider and external threats with a preventative approach that allows you to put the right controls in place and improve your overall security posture
- Continuous monitoring and protection of your virtual environments for better visibility and shorter time to resolution
- Easier management of the Virtual Environment with a central command and control point for all privileged accounts and activities across the datacenter
- Improve VMware admin efficiency to discover and manage ESX hypervisors and all guest machines
- Tighter security with privileged single sign on to ESX/guest machines
- Smoother audits and compliance with unified reports on privileged account usage and activities in virtualized environments
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