SolarWinds ARMs MSPs With New Security Tool

SolarWinds Thursday said it has acquired German software company 8MAN and at the same time launched an access risk management tool that makes the tedious, time-consuming task of regulating who can do what easier.

Based on technology from the acquisition of the early stage access rights management solution company, SolarWinds ARM was released Thursday. The company called the move “another milestone” in advancing its commitment to equipping technology professionals with security software, a lineup that includes Threat Monitor, Patch Manager, Backup, and Log and Event Manager.

“Not all threats are external,” said Kevin Thompson, CEO of Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds, in a statement. “SolarWinds ARM complements this portfolio by enabling IT professionals to centrally provision, deprovision, manage and audit user access rights to their systems, data and files while minimizing exposure to insider threats. The acquisition of 8MAN gives us the ability to leverage their development and technology expertise in the German market and beyond, which will allow us to offer another new product in the SolarWinds mold.”

[Related: SolarWinds Exec Says ‘Right Time’ For IPO As Public D ebut Flat]

Kevin Howard, chief security architect at Secuvant, a West Jordan, Utah-based MSSP, told CRN that the SolarWinds product can reclaim hours of time spent logging and mapping permissions manually.

“When you can take the management of the permissions from days down to minutes, that’s amazingly efficient and beneficial to an organization,” Howard said. “So as an IT provider, they can have this ARM technology centrally located, with access to all of their customer environments, and at the click of a button, you can assign permissions across many folders at once.”

SolarWinds ARM helps IT and security admins manage user access, improve adherence to policy compliance, and automate user provisioning and deprovisioning while protecting themselves from malicious insider abuse, according to the company. With automated user access provisioning and deprovisioning, policy analysis and reporting, compliance reporting and alerting, and productivity and process improvements, SolarWinds hopes to make the day-to-day lives of IT and security admins easier and more efficient, it said.

Howard said for many IT professionals and MSPs who are bombarded with tickets for permissions requests, the temptation they too often succumb to is opening the network to everyone.

“That’s the most common thing that we’re seeing today,” Howard said. “IT providers can’t keep up with the level of requests for properly managing permissions at this level, so they just open it up. You kind of just assign everyone permission. That is a severe risk to business.”

The ARM product will be priced and packaged into SolarWinds’ go-to-market methodology, which is “focused on delivering products that are powerful, easy to use and scalable—designed to give businesses the ability to protect their IT environments efficiently and cost-effectively," Thompson said.

Stephan Brack, CEO of 8MAN, said in a statement that the company “is pleased to join the SolarWinds family. This move was part of our strategic plan and allows us to take the next step in security innovation. We built a solution that's designed to help IT operations and security admins improve their security by managing user access, demonstrate compliance, and automate more time-consuming tasks like user provisioning and deprovisioning. Their technology expertise and growing security portfolio make SolarWinds a perfect fit to get this product distributed worldwide."