In a world where virtual machines and the guest operating systems that ride on top of them can come and go in a matter of minutes, keeping track of who accessed what can be problematic.
Xceedium this week announced that IT organizations running VMware can now rise to that challenge using XSuite for VMware, a privileged identity and access management tool that this week has now been updated to add support for instances of VMware running on-premise or in the cloud.
According to Xceedium CEO Glenn Hazard, privileged users still represent the greatest risk to any organization. With the ability to spin up virtual machines at a moment’s notice almost anywhere in the world, keeping track of which user accessed what virtual machine or guest operating system in the cloud has been nearly impossible.
Unfortunately for IT organizations, compliance regulations don’t make any exceptions for virtual machines running in the cloud. Hazard says XSuite for VMware not only provides a full audit trail, organizations can actually play back entire sequences of events to discover exactly what action was taken when, even on guest operating systems running on top of VMware.
Integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, Hazard says XSuite for VMware has been specifically designed to integrate with identity management processes in a way that extends them out to the cloud.
The days when IT organizations might be excused for not having any visibility into the cloud are quickly coming to a close. It’s pretty clear at this point that the cloud represents another tier of enterprise computing that has to be managed like any other. As a result, all the same IT management and compliance policies need to be applied regardless of where a virtual machine may be running at any given time.
