CA Southern Africa launches CA Access Control for Virtual Environments

CA Southern Africa launches CA Access Control for Virtual Environments, a new solution that extends the company’s identity and access management (IAM) security expertise and complements and protects VMware virtual environments.

CA Access Control for Virtual Environments helps customers confidently virtualise critical applications by addressing security and compliance concerns, and helping control privileged user access to the virtual environment.

“Virtualisation management tools provide IT administrators with tremendous flexibility and power to make significant, rapid changes to their virtual environments,” says Andrea Lodolo, CTO of  CA Southern Africa. “This authority increases the insider threat and raises the need to protect virtual environments from user mistakes, misuse or blatant, malicious actions by those users with the most privilege.”

The need for virtualisation security was reinforced by recent reports of significant operational disruption and financial impact at a Japanese pharmaceutical company. A former employee reportedly used his credentials to remotely access and delete multiple virtual systems that were running critical applications, such as email and others that supported financial functions.

“The security and control of virtual machines that can be rapidly produced is a contributing factor to the concept of ‘virtual stall’ and slow adoption of virtualisation,” says Lodolo. “Security is commonly cited as a reason why virtualisation is not used more pervasively in a production environment for critical applications. Now, with CA Access Control for Virtual Environments in our IAM security portfolio, we can offer customers the technology needed to automate end-to-end security of the data centre, from the mainframe and physical servers to virtual environments.”

CA Access Control for Virtual Environments helps customers: achieve compliance for their virtual data centre through privileged user management for the hypervisor and guest virtual machines; gain visibility and control over virtual environments with activity logging and privileged user password vaulting; automate security operations and reduce security costs by applying security controls according to pre-set policies; expedite adoption of virtualisation technology for critical applications by improving security controls; and create a secure, multi-tenant environment by isolating virtual machines through network zoning.

“We see CA Access Control for Virtual Environments as a key solution that will meet customer needs in virtualisation security,” says Lodolo. “By complementing and extending the security that comes with VMware, CA Access Control for Virtual Environments allows segregation of duties and control of privileged user access, all provided automatically.”