Real-time traffic analysis and inventory of virtualized assets
Catbird Insight, a visualization solution for cloud and on-premise virtual environments that helps organizations rapidly discover, organize and analyze their virtual fabric to reduce security risks, was released at RSA Conference 2015 today.
It provides cloud, network, and application owners, as well as security and compliance teams access to actionable information about their virtual infrastructure. Detailed virtual asset information, network flow information and a unique visualization of both data sets allow for enhanced analytics and improved security posture.
“The principle of least privilege is nothing new to the security world, but applying it to network security down to the host level has historically been impractical. Thanks in part to emerging analytics and automation technology; network segmentation at a granular level – micro-segmentation, in other words – is now possible,” said Adrian Sanabria, Senior Security Analyst at 451 Research.
“This is a significant security advantage of virtualization, and is a prime example of how software-defined innovations present an opportunity to reinvent defenses. The combination of virtualization and automation is allowing enterprises to improve security without adding significant implementation and management effort,” Sanabria added.
“Companies today want to adopt micro-segmentation to improve their security posture, yet find themselves lacking a good understanding of all the assets within their virtual fabric and missing insight into the baseline connectivity of those assets,” said David Keasey, CEO of Catbird. “With Catbird Insight, we easily and quickly eliminate these issues by providing a perfect inventory of assets and real-time network traffic and visualization, so organizations can easily define micro-segments and the fine-grained application-centric security policies protecting them.”
Catbird Insight works by first automatically discovering all assets within an organization’s virtual fabric. It then allows grouping of these virtual assets into logical Catbird TrustZones (micro-segments) that can be monitored and analyzed for appropriate interactions, relationships and/or compliance based on network flow data. For example, all e-commerce applications might be grouped into one Catbird TrustZone so that security and compliance teams can validate whether the security policies associated within that Catbird TrustZone work effectively based on visualizing actual traffic flows. From there, the solution provides visibility into all flows in and out of Catbird TrustZones with customized detailed reporting of traffic.
