CA Southern Africa partners with HyTrust

Technology alliance partners CA Technologies and HyTrust Inc – a leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure, have announced a collaboration to further improve security and compliance for customers using virtualised systems and cloud infrastructures.

“The benefits of this alliance are now available for customers in South Africa,” says Ugan Naidoo, MD Security, CA Southern Africa.

The HyTrust technology –HyTrust Appliance – complements CA Access Control by administering various aspects of a virtual infrastructure such as unified access control, policy enforcement and audit-quality logging. HyTrust also supports the recently announced CA Automation Suite for Clouds by providing the security policy and compliance capabilities needed to improve security of the cloud infrastructure.

“Control of internal users and mitigating internal threats is a major concern in virtualised and cloud computing environments,” says Naidoo. “Organisations need to enforce controls and they need to have assurance from any cloud provider that its IT administrators are in control when it comes to accessing customer information, applications and systems.

“Many of our customers use CA Access Control to help secure and govern privileged user access to critical systems. When coupled with the HyTrust Appliance, the synergies can deliver a robust solution to address control, security management and compliance in virtual and cloud environments, covering everything from the infrastructure to the services and applications hosted in the private or public cloud.”

Large enterprises continue to explore the benefits of the cloud based on their experiences with virtualisation, according to a December 2010 study conducted by Management Insight on behalf of CA Technologies. This expansion moves them to a more complex infrastructure that demands more sophisticated and automated management and security.

“Virtualisation presents one of the most significant security challenges an IT organisation faces, with the IT administrator being essentially given the ‘keys to the kingdom’ – access to every system and application,” says Naidoo. “In the move to the cloud, the added complexity and multi-tenancy aspects of the infrastructure bring management, security and compliance issues to the forefront.

“HyTrust Appliance, working in conjunction with CA access control and cloud automation solutions, helps solve the issues involved in enforcement of end-to-end security policies and compliance controls. The combined solution supports sophisticated cloud infrastructures and enables the deployment of mission-critical and regulated applications in virtual environments,” concludes Naidoo