CA Readies New Security Solution

Security Command Center is comprised of the new eTrust Portal and a new version of eTrust Audit, which collects and correlates security and system audit-data throughout the enterprise.

"It's the technology foundation for companies to put together a security operations center," said Simon Perry, vice president of security solutions at CA.

The Security Command Center, slated to go into beta testing later this year, is part of a broader security strategy that CA plans to unveil this week.

The strategy organizes the company's eTrust product line into four integrated solutions sets: identity management, access management, threat management and Security Command Center.

Customers are looking for a solution such as CA's Security Command Center to ease management of their IT security, said Mark Doll, Americas director of security and technology solutions at Ernst and Young.

Companies are overwhelmed by the amount of data security systems produce, he said. "There are too many things and too many vendors to manage. Only an enterprise view will survive over the long haul."

Indeed, the idea of an enterprise security management console that consolidates data from a variety of security technologies such as firewalls and intrusion-detection systems is an industry trend, said Jim Hurley, an analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Symantec, for example, plans to unveil next month a security management system that will correlate data from its and other vendors' products and allow administrators to centrally manage their security operations.

Doll said CA's solution is broader because it includes identity and access management in addition to vulnerability and threat management.

Ken Ammon, president and CEO of Netsec, a managed security provider in Herndon, Va., said security management consoles are useful tools but still require a trained security expert to read and interpret the data they produce.