Catbird vSecurity
Architecture
Catbird vSecurity is built for virtualized infrastructure, exploiting the advantages that virtualization naturally brings to security and architected to survive unique virtualization constructs such as virtual machine mobility, VM spoofing and co-tenancy when in cloud-based infrastructure
vSecurity consist of two elements: a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) and a Policy Decision Point (PDP).
PEP
The Policy Enforcement Point is a flexible virtual machine appliance—often referred to as a Catbird—deployed inside each VMware host. A Catbird appliance sits on the network, not on individual virtualized machines, and is thus non-invasive. A Catbird appliance is the eyes and ears of the virtual network, delivering security protection from inside the virtual host, reporting to the PDP. The appliance is multi-function, handling infrastructure management, IPS/IDS, vulnerability monitoring and enforcement, network access control and other classic network security tools. The appliance is extensible, meaning that any number of other network security technologies can be delivered through the virtual device.
PDP
On the other side of the PEP is a Policy Decision Point (PDP), a web-based, cloud-enabled correlation engine and expert system called the Catbird Control Center. The Control Center is typically deployed in the Security Operations Center (SOC) of an enterprise. The Control Center aggregates the data from the PEPs along with information from the hypervisor management platform and determines which assets (physical, virtual, hosted, cloud-based et al) are at risk. The Catbird Control Center provides a single enterprise-wide view of the security and compliance state of the virtual infrastructure. The Control Center is responsible for policy-based analytics and compliance workflow and reporting.
Together, the “Catbirds” and associated command center can be used to monitor any type of computing architecture.
Compliance Reporting
On top of this infrastructure is Catbird’s compliance reporting engine. This engine provides compliance reporting built on top of essential security controls, giving regulators of virtualized data centers a simple, but comprehensive, way to gauge the compliance posture of their environments against a large set of established standards, including NIST, FISMA, PCI, CoBIT and others.
