EVM Control

EVM Control™ - provides real-time, policy-based management, security, and compliance controls over virtual assets. These policy-based controls, applied against virtual assets at key operations and configuration life cycle points, ensure the enforcement of IT standards, improve reliability and availability, and reduce risk.

Challenges

IT Services are becoming increasingly complex and diverse. To limit the expensive diversity and ensure effective management, security and compliance IT organizations have established standards for supported operating environments. These standards are applied to any infrastructure supporting new and existing services.

Virtualization adds new challenges to establishing and ensuring IT policy compliance. The characteristics of virtual environments, such as snapshots, offline VMs, clones, templates, and dynamic relocation result in complex management challenges that break existing management tools. Emerging delivery models, such as virtual appliances, make matters worse by adding unique operating systems to which IT does not have visibility.

Without effective enforcement of IT policies in the virtual environment, IT organizations are exposed to security and compliance risks and left with a complex and costly to manage IT infrastructure.

EVM Control Benefits

• Policy-based management ensures adherence to security and compliance standards, even in complex, rapidly changing virtual environments
• EVM SmartHost™ technology protects hosts from unauthorized or malicious guests, reducing risk.
• EVM SmartVM™ technology ensures protected systems won’t run outside of authorized environments.
• Policy simulation enables a safe transition of new policies to a managed environment, and ad hoc, on-demand checks ensure systems are compliant before deployment

Key Features

EVM Control leverages patent-pending SmartState™ technology to provide real-time, policy-based management, security, and compliance for virtualized environments. Policy-based controls over virtual machine usage at selectable operations and configuration life cycle points ensure IT standards are enforced, improving reliability and availability, while reducing risk.

• Configurable Policy Enforcement - enables policy enforcement anywhere throughout the life cycle, across a range of operational and configuration points, providing maximum flexibility. Policies can be applied to desired points such as on discovery, creation, or cloning, before starting or stopping machines, and during release and change management events. A centralized policy store ensures updates are immediately effective, assuring the most current version of policies are always enforced.


• Adaptive Policy Engine - dynamically determines the optimal combination of configuration, operations, security, and business policies appropriate for an event, a host, or a virtual machine. The engine leverages real-time configuration information about the virtual environment in selecting and applying policies, enabling policy enforcement against even new or unknown machines. Offline VMs can be fully evaluated, minimizing risk, and allowing the identification of systems requiring updates without the overhead required to start systems before they can be managed.


• Policy Actions - provides a comprehensive and extensible set of automated responses to policy decisions such as generating notifications, issuing warnings, and quarantining or disabling virtual machines. EVM Control can also invoke workflows or user-defined scripts and automation to address complex remediation issues.


• Simulation and On-Demand Enforcement - evaluates interactions between policies to perform “what if” and impact analysis, and ensure a safe transition of new policies to a managed environment. Policy checks verify correct configurations are in place, before deployment or during activities like problem determination.


• Role Delegation and Separation of Duties - enables domain owners to define and implement only those policies appropriate to their operational responsibilities.


• Logging and Auditing - documents and records system modifications and policy changes with a detailed history of changes and transactions.