Catbird Compliance Enforcer

I had the opportunity to speak with Tamar Newberger, the VP of Marketing at Catbird, and her colleague Michael Berman, Catbird CTO, about Catbird Compliance Enforcer. Before we had a chance to actually speak about Catbird's new offering, I couldn't help but envision a large, tough-looking gentleman standing guard at the host server for virtual servers and growling at passers by.  That approach really wouldn't work in a virtualized world anyway.

Catbird is offering a free download that will certainly help small to medium size organizations facing regulatory compliance issues and wishing to deploy virtual servers to consolidate their IT infrastructure without also losing control of their environment. The free download can protect the virtual servers on a single physical host. As one would expect, Catbird is also making a more expandable version available for a fee.

The Compliance Enforcer goes beyond what other free software others are offering by actually enforcing policy rather than merely noting when and were policy wasn't followed.

We had a rather interesting conversation of how this can move security software into a position of being able to actually demonstrate a significant cost savings for an organization needing to comply with regulations. After all, companies facing these regulations know what it would cost to face the costs of an audit when an issue was found. The product costs little when compared to the costs of a forensic audit that is attempting to determine if a lack of proper controls had actually resulted in non-compliance.

I believe that security is often the last thing IT planners are thinking about when building a virtual environment. It really ought to be higher up on the priority list.