News

HyTrust Advances Role-Based Monitoring in Multi-Tenant Private Clouds

Security automation tool monitors, logs, and evaluates every administrative action initiated by every user to detect suspicious activity as it occurs.

• By Christa Ayer
• 09/16/2013

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 steps up policy enforcement in private clouds and virtualized data centers through role-based monitoring and behavior-based algorithms. The appliance intercepts all administrative requests within the virtual infrastructure, runs the request against the organization's defined policies, and permits or denies the request accordingly. It issues an immediate alert when administrative actions or behavior patterns conflict with a user's assigned role, helping prevent the theft of confidential information or an imminent data-center disaster.

The new features in HyTrust Appliance 3.5 prevent or contain damage caused by anyone misusing administrator privileges. This might include copying a virtual machine containing confidential data, deleting the entire virtual data center, or misconfiguring tenant-specific workloads in a shared infrastructure. The technology builds on the "two-person rule" defense, which delays an administrative action until a second administrator confirms it.

Additional features include a host of new configuration checks and remediation operations, support for VMware's Security Hardening Guide 5.1, and a "monitor-only" mode that lets organizations observe and log administrative activity before defining granular roles and access rules.