In a move to round out its portfolio of enterprise identity management software, CA Technologies is acquiring security software provider Xceedium.
The purchase will allow CA to offer to enterprises more comprehensive coverage of who is allowed on their sensitive networks and systems, according to CA.
Identity management is proving to be an increasingly vital component to securely managing the enterprise. It is the process of assigning each employee or contractor a systems account, and then limiting that user to only those systems that he or she has a legitimate reason to use.
The recent breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management might have been thwarted, for instance, through tighter access controls.
CA itself already offers the CA Privileged Identity Manager, which controls access to a company’s servers, limiting administrators and other privileged users to only those processes, configuration files or registries that they need to interact with. It also logs all actions these users take on sensitive systems. Xceedium’s Xsuite extends this control to cloud operations outside of the organization’s firewall.
Both CA and Xceedium are among a number of companies addressing this market, often referred to as privileged identity management. They compete with the likes of BeyondTrust, Centrify, CyberArk, Dell, Hitachi, and Lieberman Software.
Founded in 2000, Xceedium is headquartered in Herndon, Virginia.
The company has garnered customers across finance, retail, manufacturing and federal government. Xceedium’s technology, for which it has four U.S. patents, meets regulatory standards for a number of industries, including PCI compliance for the retail industry, HIPAA for health care, FISMA for financial companies, and Common Criteria EAL4+ for the U.S. military.
Xceedium’s software can run either as an image on a cloud service such as Amazon’s, or as a virtual appliance on an organization’s own servers.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. CA expects to close the deal by the end of September.