Solidcore Intros S3 Control Software for Validating Changes in VMware Environments

Solidcore Systems, a company that specializes in change audit and configuration control, announced its S3 Control software, which can detect and validate change events to VMware environments in real time.

 

Solidcore can automate PCI and SOX controls for compliance reporting and it locks down critical systems to ensure only trusted applications run. It also prevents change-related outages for improved service availability and accelerated ITIL adoption. 

 

The S3 Control software manages change in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructure with an enterprise change management process. The Solidcore capabilities enable customers to define comprehensive change policies and also streamline validation of changes in the IT environment in order to prevent downtime.

 

Enterprise IT organizations are required to maintain the integrity of virtual systems in productive environments. The companies want to employ same processes to virtual infrastructures which are available for physical infrastructures including Information Technology infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) standards.

 

Solidcore S3 Control helps reduce problems in managing multitude of change events in virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time. It alerts and reports on change events and correlates changes to authorization. These change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA (News - Alert) Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

 

“As an increasing number of customers adopt a ‘VMware first’ policy for deploying new IT systems, the need to track and manage change across these virtual environments has become just as important as managing change on physical systems,” said Nand Mulchandani, senior director of product management and marketing at VMware. “By enabling changes in virtualized environments to be implemented in compliance with policies, Solidcore complements the robust security inherently built into VMware virtualized infrastructures.”

 

Solidcore S3 Control is able to capture details like “who” are making changes, “when” and “where” besides “what” is being changed. This enables IT organizations to ensure that deployed virtual and physical systems are in a verified state always. It is able to track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs.

Solidcore identifies new users which are created, edited or deleted besides detecting new hosts in VMware VirtualCenter. S3 Control will validate these changes with the help of change management system, where all changes are marked as “authorized” if they have a matching ticket. Then the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes which do not have a matching ticket will be identified for review.

 

“Only when you get control over change and map that change to your approved process do you easily realize a high degree of compliance, security and availability,” said Anne Bonaparte, president and CEO of Solidcore, in a statement.