CA Launches Mission Control for Enterprise Security.

Enterprise security is one area where a lack of integration between security products has the potential to leave exploitable gaps, something Computer Associates International Inc feels it has addressed with the delivery of its new eTrust Security Command Center product line.

The product, in beta since January, was launched yesterday at CA World in Las Vegas, alongside eTrust Vulnerability Manager, an addition to the company's threat management stable that comes in the shape of a hardened rack-mounted Intel-based appliance.

"More security products don't necessarily make an organization more secure. Better security management does," Russ Artzt, CA's executive VP said, "and we're going to be a major force in security management with Command Center."

The job of Command Center is to reduce the mass of security data gathered from deployed security tools, to differentiate actionable alerts from the background noise created by the hundreds of thousands of network events that can be logged by security systems each day. The system will siphon data from other eTrust modules, as it will third-party anti-virus, intrusion detection or firewall security tools such as those sold by Check Point, McAfee, ISS, Cisco, Microsoft, Symantec and Trend Micro.

"We recognize how complex enterprise security is," he said. "It is a very, very fragmented market. Some of our clients are running up to four different intrusion detection systems, they have several firewall systems, a number of anti-virus programs. Basically, it's a data problem."

Security administrators can view key events flagged by the Command Center from any web browser to tap into a portal that is built by the system to show a variety of views. These may be changes in the overall status of enterprise security, detailed log scans, a web stream of latest virus alerts, the state of specific infrastructure assets, or the health of security devices themselves. The system, which is already integrated with the new eTrust Vulnerability Manager appliance, is priced at a one time charge of $25,000 per server, plus a monthly fee of $60 for each agent deployed.

The new vulnerability detection system is said to be particularly easy to deploy, and gives remediation advice that is relevant to which network asset is seen as being susceptible to a particular vulnerability. "We rolled it out within CA across 16,000 machines in just three days," Artzt claimed. "It is probably the most robust vulnerability database in the industry, with around 6,000 vulnerabilties listed in the database already and our research team is capturing new vulnerabilities every day."

The system displays the risk level of a known vulnerability, it logs the details of that vulnerability and then charts the IP address of assets that are likely to be impacted with a step-by-step guide to remediation. The Islandia, New York-based vendor will be selling eTrust Vulnerability Manager with a price tag of $25,000 per appliance, plus a monthly service charge for access to the vulnerability database of $2 a month for each node secured by the system.