Cyber-Ark Software has extended its auto-discovery capabilities for proactively detecting privileged accounts within virtualised environments.
The extension is designed to increase security provider's enterprise suitability for protecting and managing critical applications, identities and sensitive information in the cloud and forms part of the enhancements just launched with version 7 of its Privileged Identity Management Suite.
Cyber-Ark is claiming this newest version of its identity management software can automatically secure, manage and log all privileged accounts and uses associated with data centre management.
"The sheer effort associated with managing large numbers of privileged accounts across a virtualised environment can create significant challenges and acute security risk if organisations are not using a proactive, programmatic approach, " said Roy Adar, Cyber-Ark Software vice president of product management.
He said that this version of Cyber-Ark's suite offered a preventative and automated control for managing, monitoring and controlling both known and unknown privileged accounts within virtual data centres.
"It will not only improve security, but also operational efficiency and security policy compliance," Adar added.
The virtualisation enhancements are designed to provide data centre administrators with a systematic, scalable approach to the provisioning and de-provisioning of VMware ESX/ESXi and vCentre privileged, root and shared accounts.
Datacentre managers can also protect privileged credentials in a secure Digital Vault, and enforce security policies, such as the periodic replacement of all privileged credentials of hypervisor and guest images, as well as impose change-management approval procedures as part of emergency access and system maintenance workflows.
Graham Titterington, Ovum principal analyst, told IT Pro's sister title Cloud Pro, that virtualisation was gaining ground rapidly, where some surveys suggest that 50 per cent of datacentre servers are now virtualised. "So this extension is an important and useful enhancement to Cyber-Ark's product, that is essential to maintaining its long-term relevance," he said.
Other new Privileged Identity Management Suite version 7 features include an enhanced management dashboard. Users can monitor privileged accounts with the web-based account, operational and personalised user account views and built-in audit, compliance and operational reports for tracking who uses these privileged accounts, when and for what reason.
It has also added new set-up wizards to ease integration with directories and email servers for alerting and reporting, as well as ensure continuity of service and high system availability during upgrades and deployment.
