Proactive security for private clouds and virtual environments

Cyber-Ark Software extended its auto-discovery capabilities for proactively detecting privileged accounts within virtualized environments.

This scalable capability to support security and compliance priorities across the data centre is just one of several operational and efficiency-focused enhancements available in version 7 of Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite.

Greater adoption of virtualized technology across the data centre continues to drive operational and cost benefits. However, that adoption also leads to exponential security and risk specifically related to the rapid provisioning of new virtual machines, and managing and monitoring related privileged access and activity.

Additionally, organizations need to continue to be acutely aware of the risks of attacks targeting hypervisor privileged accounts, given their massive, high-level access to potentially thousands of virtualized servers, databases and applications.

Cyber-Ark enables data centre administrators with a systematic, scalable approach to:

• Automatically provision and deprovision VMware ESX/ESXi and vCenter privileged, root and shared accounts
• Protect the privileged credentials in a highly secure, tamper-proof Digital Vault
• Enforce security policies such as periodic replacement of all privileged credentials of the hypervisor and guest images
• Enforce change-management approval procedures as part of emergency access and system maintenance workflows.

Cyber-Ark’s auto-discovery feature and the ability to simplify management across the privileged account lifecycle in frequently changing virtualized environments empower organizations to create a unified accountability and control point over privileged accounts.

The solution improves operational efficiency by automating privileged credential management and supports audit and compliance requirements with detailed logging of activities – processes that would be nearly impossible to accomplish manually.