After the overwhelming success of Tripwire, a number of other companies are entering the “security compliance for virtual infrastructures” market: Configuresoft, Third Brigade, and now Catbird.
Catbird is a security startup that targets the virtualization market since day one. Their V-Agent is an intrusion detection/prevention system (IDS/IPS) plus network admission control (NAC) system running inside a virtual appliance for VMware Infrastructure.
Like many of its competitors, Catbird has to wait for VMware and its VMsafe APIs to really differentiate itself from traditional security vendors moving their products inside a virtual machine.
Meanwhile the company decided to extend their product portfolio and launched a service called Compliance Enforcer.
It uses the V-Agents mentioned above to collect data about the virtual infrastructure and then submits it to a central server (the Catbird Control Center or C2C). The C2C can be installed at customers site or run on a managed service provider (MSP).
Catbird offers a free version of the product which includes 5 V-Agents and a C2C that is hosted in a Catbird SOC co-located in a Equinix facility.
The customers can configure the Compliance Enforcer to check the compliance against most popular security standards like PCI, FISMA, GLBA, HIPPA and SOX.
Unfortunately none of them is virtualization-ready, but Catbird allows to modify the pre-defined template to introduce custom checks.
Once the product recognizes a non-compliant virtual machine, it can just alert the administrator, interact with VMware vCenter and block the unauthorized traffic, or even put a non-compliant virtual machine in a virtual quarantine network.
Catbird has been included in the Virtualization Industry Radar.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.