Cyber-Ark Announces Partnership with Courion to Provide Industry's First Comprehensive Identity and Privileged User Management Solution.

Partnership Enables Courion Customers to Expand Their Identity Management Initiatives to Centralized Management of Privileged Users

DEDHAM, Mass. -- Cyber-Ark[R] Software, the information security software company that develops and markets digital vaults for securing and managing highly-sensitive information within and across global enterprise networks, today announced a strategic partnership with Courion[R] Corporation, the provisioning specialist, to deliver their customers the benefits of privileged user management. Privileged accounts are the non-personal passwords that exist in virtually every device or software application in an enterprise, such as root on a UNIX server, Administrator on a Windows workstation, and Cisco Enable on a Cisco device.

Under the terms of the agreement, Courion will offer Cyber-Ark's award-winning Enterprise Password Vault (EPV) as an addition to its Enterprise Provisioning Suite[TM] solution. Cyber-Ark's Enterprise Password Vault is uniquely positioned to eliminate one of today's biggest IT security and compliance risks: the mismanagement of privileged user accounts and passwords, which may result in costly outages, lost business, legal liability and or audit deficiencies.

"The Courion Cyber-Ark partnership strengthens the two organizations hold within the Password Management market. By adding Cyber-Ark's functionality to the Courion suite of provisioning and password reset solutions, there is now an added layer of security for enterprise organizations," said J. Alan Bird, vice president of business development at Cyber-Ark. "We are delighted to partner with Courion, which leads the identity management market in applying technology innovation that simplifies the complexities of provisioning. Together, Cyber-Ark and Courion will deliver a more comprehensive password management solution that enhances not only an organization's ability to securely manage all of its personal passwords, but its non-personal passwords and IDs as well."

"Regulatory compliance is now forcing organizations to safeguard the use of administrative or privileged passwordsCoan often overlooked, but very real security threat," said Kurt Johnson, vice president of corporate development at Courion. "For this reason, we've experienced overwhelming demand from our customers to extend the reach of our user provisioning and password management solutions to include privileged and administrator account protection. Our customers were asking us for a solution to address this growing issue and we responded, by offering an integrated Courion-Cyber-Ark solution that will help them to manage passwords on all systems, databases, applications and network devices found within their IT environments."

Up to 70 percent of system breaches are caused by internal users, and in particular, privileged administrators and power users who accidentally or deliberately damage IT systems or release confidential data assets. For this reason, privileged accounts are under increasing scrutiny by internal and external auditors, and the inability to safeguard the use of administrative or privileged passwords is becoming one of the key reasons that many organizations fail compliance audits. Until recently, organizations had no way to effectively secure, manage, update and control privileged user accounts, which include, but are not limited to, generic accounts such as Administrator on Wintel platforms, Root on UNIX systems, Cisco Enable, DBA passwords and hard-coded passwords found in application scripts throughout an enterprise.

"Provisioning tools are well-suited for managing identities and driving password changes, but they have difficulty managing secure access to privileged accounts", noted Mark Diodati, Identity and Privacy Strategies analyst with the Burton Group. "In particular, provisioning tools are challenged to provide both administrative self-service checkout for privileged passwords, and the necessary infrastructure to remove embedded privileged passwords from applications. The integration of a traditional provisioning system and a secure password vault can assist organizations in achieving compliance goals with respect to privileged accounts."

Cyber-Ark's Enterprise Password Vault provides a safe haven where all privileged users' passwords can be securely archived, transferred, shared, and managed by authorized users. Multiple security layers provide the most secure solution for managing passwords in an enterprise environment, which addresses Sarbanes-Oxley audit and compliance requirements and prevents usage of the same passwords across multiple systems, non-expired passwords, and "easy to remember" passwords. A detailed audit trail, disaster-recovery ready solutions, and granular Access-Control mechanisms help make Enterprise Password Vault the information security software selection for a number of large enterprise and compliance and regulation heavy organizations.

About Cyber-Ark

Cyber-Ark Software is an Information Security company that develops and markets digital vaults for securing and managing sensitive information within and across global enterprise networks. Based on it's patented Vaulting Technology[TM], Cyber-Ark's digital vault products include: The Inter-Business Vault, a secure infrastructure for cross-enterprise data exchange of highly-sensitive information; the Network Vault[R], for secure storage and management of highly-sensitive documents, and the Enterprise Password Vault, for the secure management of administrative, emergency and privileged user passwords. Cyber-Ark's Vaulting platform has been tested by ICSA Labs, an independent division of Cybertrust. ICSA is the security industry's central authority for research, intelligence, and certification testing of security products.

Cyber-Ark Software was founded in 1999 by a team of industry-recognized security experts with the aim of producing a truly effective security offering where complete end-to-end security was the initial, key design consideration rather than applied as an afterthought. Today, over 200 Global 1000 companies rely on Cyber-Ark Software's digital vault solutions for managing, sharing and securing highly-sensitive information both within their organization and with their partners, vendors and customers. Cyber-Ark Software is privately held and backed by some of the world's most successful venture capitalists, including Jerusalem Venture Partners, Seed Capital Partners (a SOFTBANK Affiliate), JP Morgan/Chase Partners and Vertex Management.

The company is located in Dedham, Mass. and on the World Wide Web at www.cyber-ark.com

About Courion

Courion's rapid business impact approach enables you to avoid the pitfalls of traditional user provisioning and achieve lasting business value. By eliminating dependencies, prerequisites, and other barriers to provisioning success, Courion is able to address the specific business needs of customers and provide both extensibility and adaptability to the changes that are the reality of today's business environment. Powered by the industry's most flexible provisioning technology, Dynamic Community[TM] set-based provisioning, Courion offers an integrated suite of solutions for user provisioning, role management, enterprise single sign-on, audit compliance and password management. For more information, please visit our website at www.courion.com.

Courion is a registered trademark of Courion Corporation. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.