Emerging Vendors

February 03, 2009

Company: Xceedium

Headquarters: Jersey City, N.J.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Xceedium GateKeeper

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 18 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Xceedium's lineup of security appliances helps customers navigate their way through the alphabet soup of compliance regulations, including PCI DSS, HIPAA and SOX, helping to keep a lid on insider threats.

The Lowdown: In light of malware attacks and data breaches that seemingly occur daily, organizations of all sizes face mounting pressures from regulatory agencies to ensure customer privacy and to adhere to compliance mandates. In part, that means making sure disgruntled insiders, profiteers and even unwitting employees don't disclose sensitive data to prying eyes.

"For retailers and name-brand organizations, it doesn't take much for an issue around loss of customer data to damage your business," said Dave Ballard, vice president of sales for Xceedium.

Addressing what is known as the "insider threat," the Xceedium GateKeeper provides physical control of critical IT infrastructure while giving partners and IT administrators the ability to monitor and manage all network activity.

Focusing on users' profiles instead of the application, GateKeeper makes sure sensitive data stays put by compartmentalizing and containing high-risk users.

Xceedium GateKeeper

Partners or administrators can then track all user behavior, including keystroke logging, from a central location, while receiving realtime security alerts of any suspicious network activity. The offering also determines various levels of access and authority specific to each user and prevents users from "leapfrogging" to unauthorized parts of the network.

To keep organizations on top of compliance regulations, the Xceedium Gateway logs activity and provides partners and organizations with comprehensive reports for audits and regulatory compliance mandates, such as PCI DSS, HIPAA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

While Xceedium's primary customer market is the enterprise, its GateKeeper 620 is scaled specifically for SMB customers, with a slightly lower level of entry, and is available only through channel partners.

Partners can wrap management and assessment services around Xceedium's products to provide customers with "something they haven't seen before," Ballard said. "That uniqueness combined with pent-up demand is an attractive proposition."