ArcSight Announces Appliance-based Network Configuration Product

ArcSight Automates Network Configuration Process, Expands Offerings to Network Operations

CUPERTINO, Calif. - December 4, 2006 - ArcSight, Inc., a leader in Network and Security Information Management solutions, today announced the immediate availability of an appliance-based network configuration management solution that optimizes and automates the manual and tedious process of making configuration changes and documenting those changes across large networks. ArcSight Network Configuration Manager (NCM) improves the productivity and responsiveness of IT staffs to changing business needs while maintaining and improving network compliance, security and reliability.

"ArcSight NCM enables us to better leverage the resources of our network operations organization by freeing up our engineers from day to day network configuration management tasks," said Arsen Khousnoutidinov, Manager, Network Infrastructure, Boston Medical Center. "We are constantly working to keep up with a high volume of network configuration changes that, while tedious, require advanced knowledge of our network and devices. ArcSight NCM automates these tasks with an easy-to-use solution so that we can focus on other more important network engineering responsibilities."

Network Operation Challenges
IT organizations struggle to keep up with network change requests and service level agreements while adhering to their internal configuration and change management policies. The majority of day-to-day network configuration changes are repetitive tasks performed by a small set of highly skilled network engineers with the proper authorization and expertise. These engineers in turn become overwhelmed with change requests and have little time for documenting the changes, engineering more efficient networks, enabling new services and evaluating new technologies. In addition, they are now expected to meet compliance requirements such as following a pre-defined change management process, documenting the change steps and validating that these steps always conform to the explicit policies. In many cases, other resources may be available to help but are hindered by the current set of tools available to them.

ArcSight Network Configuration Manager
ArcSight NCM automates network configuration tasks - quickly responding to network events, while making sure any network configuration changes are automatically documented and conform to both operational policy as well as any regulatory mandates. Until ArcSight NCM, attempts at solving these complex and repetitive tasks have either been home-grown scripts or software solutions that require extensive effort to secure the host and protect the server running the solution.

"ArcSight NCM is delivering a new way to simplify and automate network configuration management tasks," said Elisabeth Rainge, Director of Network and Service Management, IDC. "What's unique is that ArcSight is delivering a single platform for network availability and configuration management in an appliance form factor with role-based access rights - that isn't reliant on SNMP. It shows an updated understanding of growing network configuration requirements of enterprises with deeply embedded automation and high availability capabilities."

ArcSight NCM provides automation for network operations and is designed for ease of use, speed of deployment and flexibility. It delivers:

• Network Discovery and Visualization. ArcSight NCM automatically discovers network devices or leverages data from existing network management applications already performing device discovery. Presenting it in a visual format, it helps organizations spot misconfigurations, redundant links and multiple WAN access routes.

• Configuration and Change Management. ArcSight NCM builds and maintains configuration libraries, automates the change process with templates and out-of-the-box wizards and allows mapping those wizards to an organization's needs - abstracting configuration details so they are more specific to network, policies, operational procedures, as well as masking and mapping the data so that more people can use the solution. It also ensures control and accountability with an authorization queue.

• Compliance Audit and Remediation. ArcSight NCM dynamically compares the existing device configurations against desired configuration policies that map to regulatory requirements, operational guidelines and business rules. Unlike traditional approaches which do not validate configuration changes in real-time and rely only on audits to identify compliance failures, policy compliance is enforced before changes take place and reported in near real-time. A compliance dashboard provides a quick status of current network device configuration with organizational standards.

ArcSight Family of Network Appliances
ArcSight NCM is part of the ArcSight family of network appliances that help network operations automate configuration and change management, security and compliance processes, and bridge the gap between network and security operations. It follows the June 2006 release of ArcSight Network Response Manager (NRM) which automates network responses to security incidents. ArcSight NCM is a natural extension of ArcSight NRM through its ability to automate and solve common network operations challenges, whether they are the responsibility of security or network management teams. Both groups can benefit from automating common processes that are typically performed by highly skilled engineers such as cross-vendor and cross-device expertise, in-depth and timely analysis of network configurations, and compliance requirements with security and network change management policies. A third appliance also announced today, ArcSight Logger provides a simple and cost-effective way for all groups within IT operations to capture network events for further analysis as necessary.  

"We founded ArcSight on the premise that security operations teams needed solutions to help them do their jobs more effectively and more efficiently," said Hugh Njemanze, CTO and EVP of Research and Development at ArcSight." With the release of our networking and log management appliances, we are extending this mission to help network operations teams get back to network engineering, with the additional benefit of helping networking and security teams to realize the benefits of collaborating to reduce security risks and improve compliance across the organization."

ArcSight NCM is available today.

About ArcSight
ArcSight, a leader in Network and Security Information Management delivers mission-critical solutions for security, network and IT operations that enable enterprises to turn operational data into action. ArcSight solutions address today's complex enterprise networks that span multiple organizations and corporate business initiatives. By comprehensively collecting, analyzing, managing and responding to security and network data, ArcSight solutions mitigate information risk for real-time threat management, compliance reporting and automated network response. ArcSight's customer base includes leading global enterprises, government agencies and MSSPs.

ArcSight, ArcSight Logger, ArcSight NCM, ArcSight NRM and the ArcSight logo are trademarks of ArcSight, Inc.

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Contact Information
Erin O'Keeffe
Horn Group for ArcSight
415-905-4005
eokeeffe@horngroup.com
 

 

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