Xceedium

Xceedium, Inc., is a network security software company that provides privileged identity and access management solutions. Their software is used to mitigate the risks that privileged users, privileged accounts (admin, root, etc.) and privileged credentials (passwords, certificates, digital keys, etc.) pose to systems and data.

Xceedium specializes in mid-large sized enterprises in vertical market segments including Banking and Financial Services, Retail, Telecom, Healthcare, Energy and Government Agencies. They market their product through a global partner network.

The Xceedium Xsuite™ platform enables organizations to apply the principle of least privilege, which holds that systems and individuals should only be granted access to the resources and commands that are absolutely necessary for the required task. According to the company, its Xsuite product limits access for privileged users to the systems and commands for which they are explicitly authorized (Role-based access control). It monitors the activities of privileged users and sends alerts when individuals attempt to violate a policy. The system records privileged user sessions such as telnet, RDP, SSH, and VNC and provides a mechanism to replay recorded session for investigations and forensics.

Xceedium is a private, venture-backed company with funding from ArrowPath Venture Partners and Nationwide Mutual Capital. In June 2012, Xceedium closed a $12 million financing led by ArrowPath Venture Partners bringing the total capital raised to $25M^[1]

Company History

Xceedium Inc., was founded in 2000 by David Van and David Cheung as a technology management company targeting Wall Street customers. Xceedium split from Lucid Technologies Group, a company created in 1995.^[2] The company developed software for internal use that provided its consultants with secure remote access to sensitive customer systems. This software became the core technology for the Xceedium GateKeeper product. Xceedium headquarters was originally located in Jersey City, New Jersey until it relocated to Northern Virginia in March 2011. Initial funding for the venture-backed company came from ArrowPath Venture Partners and Nationwide Mutual Capital. Xceedium was acquired by CA Technologies in August 2015.^[3]

• 7/21/10—Glenn Hazard is named Chairman and CEO of Xceedium
• 4/4/11—Gatekeeper achieved Common Criteria EAL4+ Certification. The certification provides a common framework for government agencies to evaluate security features and capabilities of information technology security products.
• 6/28/11—Gatekeeper received FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Certification. FIPS 140-2 provides a common framework for government agencies and other highly regulated industries to evaluate the cryptographic security capabilities of information technology products.
• 9/8/11—Xceedium acquired Cloakware Password Authority from Irdeto.
• 9/11/11—Xceedium announced availability of Xceedium Xsuite – a combination of Xceedium’s GateKeeper and Cloakware Password Authority
• 6/5/12—Xceedium unveiled Xsuite Cloud for Amazon Web Services.
• 2/12/13 Xceedium released Xsuite for VMware vSphere.
• 8/17/15 Xceedium acquired by CA Technologies.

Products

Gatekeeper was the first product designed by the company, initially built with out-of-band and in-band KVM for remote IT control. The GateKeeper™ software was updated to provide network-based access control and session recording/playback. Later, GateKeeper and Cloakware Password Authority (acquired from Irdeto) were integrated to form Xsuite.

The main capabilities of Xceedium Xsuite are: role-based access control, command filtering (white/black list), user containment (prevents SSH based leapfrogging or RDP hopping to unauthorized nodes), session monitoring/policy violation alerting, session recording and playback and privileged password vaulting and management.^[4]

Xsuite Cloud for Amazon Web Services (AWS) was introduced as an extension to the Xsuite platform. It provides privileged identity and access management for standalone AWS implementations or hybrid architectures that can include infrastructure nodes (e.g., servers, network devices, storage devices, security systems) running on: AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), private clouds, as virtual machines or traditional single OS/hardware scenarios^[5]

Executive Officers

Further reading

• Next Generation Privileged Identity Management
• Privileged Accounts: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
• Defining the Hybrid Cloud
• Migrating On-Premise [sic] Controls to the Cloud

The Threat Within: The Case for Zero Trust Access Control - Securosis Blog Post Series – Watching the Watchers:

References