Catbird Partners VMware To Add Firewall Controls To Virtualised Infrastructures

Catbird, a specialist in security and compliance for virtual, cloud and physical networks, announced that VMware vShield App controls are now available for Catbird vSecurity through an embedded OEM partnership with VMware.

The integration gives Catbird vSecurity customers the ability to deploy VMware vShield App as an integrated component of Catbird’s security and compliance product for virtualised infrastructure.

Standards compliance

With the addition of VMware vShield into vSecurity’s Control Centre, Catbird’s vCompliance engine now measures and monitors the application of VMware vShield App controls to popular compliance standards including PCI, NIST, FISMA, DIACAP and HIPAA. In addition, Catbird Trustzones can enforce logical segmentation and automated quarantining of assets based on compliance levels, helping reduce the risk of security breach, data loss and compliance audit violations.

Catbird customers can also use the firewall features of VMware vShield App to automatically segment the virtual switching fabric

“Customers are eager to virtualise sensitive systems, such as PCI payment processing, and integrating VMware vShield App into vSecurity reduces the complexity of meeting such audit requirements,” said Edmundo Costa, Catbird CEO. “Catbird’s award-winning security orchestration now incorporates VMware vShield App for native application- aware access control and deep-packet inspection, delivering world-class protection for organisations regulated by specifications such as PCI, HIPAA and NIST.”

Available controls include vulnerability management, IPS/IDS, network segmentation, policy enforcement, inventory, configuration and change management, as well as monitoring and enforcement in many other operational, security and compliance areas. Catbird’s feature set allows its customers to meet a variety of compliance standards, including PCI, NIST, SOX, HIPAA DIACAP and FISMA, in virtual environments.

Regulatory control

“As regulated industries virtualise, they need to ensure their processes and tools for security and compliance adapt to this new environment,” said Parag Patel, vice president for Global Strategic Alliances at VMware. “VMware’s integration with Catbird is an important move in enabling our customers to proactively ensure compliance while leveraging native technology and an award-winning partner in our ecosystem.”

Catbird’s approach weaves together access control, intrusion detection, secure auditing and automated protection for virtual machines, virtual networks, hypervisor management and associated physical assets.

With the release of vSecurity 5.0 in January, Catbird incorporated features like an event viewer, which orchestrates and displays data culled from a range of controls, including nprobe, firewall, NAC, IDS/IPS and other sources, to paint a picture of what each control is detecting in real time. The event viewer provides analysis of the security posture of each asset, as well as the interrelationships between assets, to determine risks and vulnerabilities.