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CA Technologies acquires Xceedium to provide comprehensive offering for combating privileged user security breaches and compliance risks

Acquisition of privileged identity management 'trailblazer' will expand customer options for securing IT administrator accounts across hybrid IT environments.


Johannesburg, 01 Sep 2015

CA Technologies announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Xceedium, a provider of privileged identity management solutions that protect on-premises, cloud and hybrid IT environments. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close within the quarter.

Recent mega breaches and growing compliance and audit demands have increased the need to control and manage the credentials and activities of privileged users who have unfettered access to high-value systems that store and process sensitive information. The acquisition of Xceedium will extend CA's security portfolio, giving customers a comprehensive solution for controlling and protecting IT administrator or other privileged user accounts from external attacks or insider mistakes and malicious misuse.

"Our digital world gives organisations tremendous opportunity; it also introduces additional regulatory demands and increased risk as bad actors penetrate our networks using stolen credentials which give them the proverbial 'keys to the kingdom," says Michael Horn, CA Southern Africa, business unit head, security. "The CA and Xceedium combination will reinforce our leadership position in privileged identity management and offer customers a flexible approach to managing privileged identity compliance and risk."

Xsuite, Xceedium's innovative privileged identity management solution for hybrid IT environments, offers an identity-centric, proxy-based approach. It provides a centralised point of authentication for administrators, brokering the release of credentials for shared administrative accounts without exposing them to the risk of theft, compromise, or misuse. Deployed as a physical or virtual appliance or as an Amazon machine image, Xsuite provides scalability and simplified deployment. It also helps address security and compliance needs: namely, centralised shared account management for enhanced administrator accountability, administrative session recording for audit and incident forensics, and command filtering to limit the scope of administrator activity and network access.

This complements CA Privileged Identity Manager's resource- or host-based access control approach, which focuses on controlling access to the server operating system and limits the scope for administrators - especially superusers - to modify processes, configuration files or registries. CA's solution supplements centralised IT administrator access management with controls to minimise the risk of a privileged user unleashing malware - a common tactic used by attackers to launch breaches and avoid detection. Together, the solutions will help protect privileged accounts from compromise, provide tightly defined access controls, and enable monitoring of privileged user activity across an organisation's entire hybrid IT infrastructure, further minimising the risk of breaches.

"Protecting against attacks on privileged user credentials can be the difference between staying in business and going out of business. It also has become a critical element of our national defence as recent attacks on government systems reveal an escalation in attacks from cyber crime to cyber espionage," said Glenn Hazard, Xceedium CEO. "Stealing and exploiting privileged accounts is a central element of the kill chain in cyber attacks of all kinds, regardless of attacker origin. We're excited to join forces with CA to help deliver a next generation threat mitigation suite to the market that directly addresses these devastating data breaches and attacks."

Xceedium, headquartered in Herndon, Va, was founded in 2000 and has offices in Jersey City, NJ, and Ottawa, Canada.

It holds four patents in the area of privileged identity management and supports customers across multiple markets including finance, retail, manufacturing and federal government.

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CA Southern Africa

CA Southern Africa is the leading provider of IT management and security solutions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Through the use of technology it assists its customers to transform and seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business in every industry in the application economy. CA Southern Africa are IT management experts working with customers across sub-Saharan Africa to change the way we live, transact, communicate, across: mobile; private and public cloud; distributed and mainframe environments.

For further information log on to: www.ca.com/za

Xceedium

Xceedium is the leading provider of privileged identity management solutions for hybrid enterprises. Large companies and global government agencies use Xceedium products to reduce the risks privileged users and unprotected credentials pose to systems and data. The company's Xsuite platform enables customers to implement a zero trust security model. It vaults privileged account credentials, implements role-based access controls, and monitors and records privileged user sessions. With unified policy management, Xsuite enables the seamless administration of security controls across systems, whether they reside in a traditional data centre, a private cloud, on public cloud infrastructure, or a combination of environments.

Xceedium's solutions enable organisations to comply with security and privacy mandates, such as PCI DSS, FISMA, HIPAA, and NERC CIP. The company's products provide industry-leading reliability, availability, and scalability, and they are the most highly certified products in the market, with designations including FIPS 140-2 validation, Common Criteria EAL4+ certification, and inclusion on the US DOD Unified Command Approved Products List (UC/APL). For more information, please visit www.xceedium.com.

Editorial contacts

Deirdre Blain
Blain Communications
(+27) 83 230 5522
blain@iafrica.com
Joanne Cawrse
CA Southern Africa
(+27) 11 417 8645
joanne.cawrse@caafrica.co.za