Bit9 Announces Managed Services, New Whitelisting Solution

Security vendor Bit9 has added a new managed service and an updated version of its flagship whitelisting software to help enterprises fight advanced persistent threats.

The Bit9 Managed Administration Service is designed for organizations with a small IT staff that are looking to hand off aspects of their security. According to the company, the service gives Bit9 responsibility for: creating and managing software trust policies; management of user requests to install unknown or untrusted software; audit reporting; health and performance assessments of the environment; and preventive maintenance such as backup monitoring.

“Bit9’s Managed Administration Service enables organizations to meet their security, compliance, availability and performance goals by leveraging Bit9’s experience to raise their security posture and free up staff to focus on other important IT and security projects,” said Di Hall, vice president of services at Bit9, in a statement. “We have been providing this service to customers on a trial basis and the feedback has been very strong, so we are making it available to all customers, who now will be able to leverage Bit9’s expertise to manage their trust-based security.”

Bit9’s approach blends the security advantages of trust-based app control with the company’s administrative expertise, said Scott Crawford, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates, in a statement.

“The approach is based on permitting trusted software rather than blocking a virtually endless variety of unknowns offers significant advantages in the face of a constantly changing threat landscape,” he said. “Coupling this with centralized administration as a service enables organizations to add security expertise with minimal impact while retaining full control of their security policies, freeing IT staff to perform other important work.”

Bit9 also announced version 7 of whitelisting solution, with a number of enhancements. According to the company, the latest release leverages trust ratings from Bit9’s cloud-based Global Software Registry.  In addition, Bit9 has improved memory protection, file integrity monitoring and device control to provide a single trust-based security solution across all enterprise systems—servers, desktops and laptops. Other improvements are in the area of scalability and optimization for virtual environments.

“Today’s cyberthreats have proliferated to an extent that makes a number of legacy techniques to defense impractical at best, ineffective at worst,” Crawford said. “Application control offers a more feasible alternative based on permitting the known rather than blocking a virtually endless variety of unknowns. Bit9’s innovative trust-based solution embraces these values and complements them with scalability and reduced user impact that makes application control a viable strategy in the enterprise.”