Catbird Security (www.catbird.com), provider of the industry’s only fully-hosted, enterprise-class, managed security platform and developer of the new V-Agent™ virtual agent, and Entisys (www.entisys.com), VMware’s Enterprise Premier Partner of the Year (2006), today announced the inclusion of Catbird’s comprehensive security service into Entisys’ virtualization practice as a key component of its industry-leading Virtualization Oriented Architecture Methodology. Entisys’ client base will now be the beneficiaries of state-of-the-art security built into their virtualization strategy from inception.

Industry experts have been cautioning against a rush to embrace virtualization without considering the security implications of such a transition. Catbird and Entisys are at the vanguard of the movement addressing these concerns. Catbird’s recently-released V-Agent is the only completely stateless agent that delivers broad hacker protection to virtual networks – for the first time enabling rogue virtual-device monitoring; IPS/IDS; security compliance; and vulnerability monitoring to servers running multiple virtual machines based on VMware.

“We are thrilled to launch our VMware channel with Entisys,” said Edmundo Costa, COO of Catbird. “Catbird’s core business model is to enable its partners to quickly and easily deliver comprehensive enterprise-class security to physical and virtual environments.”

When initially defining their Virtualization Methodologies, Entisys determined that they not only needed to address security as a component, but also as a process. “The combination of Catbird’s Software-as-a-Service and the elegance of the V-Agent itself created the opportunity to identify security risks within existing infrastructures,” enthused Michael Strohl, CEO of Entisys. “But more importantly, it gave us the foundation to build security management into all virtual infrastructures as part of our Virtualization Oriented Architecture(VOA) methodologies. Catbird was the perfect fit.”

“As we have been actively evangelizing the benefits of virtualization, we are observing that security is one of the main impediments to its widespread adoption,” said Jaymes Davis, Virtualization Practice Manager for Entisys. “Entisys is on the forefront of addressing the emerging needs of the Enterprise. We are doing it again with Catbird.”

Effective immediately, Catbird’s V-Agent virtual agent will be the security component of Entisys’ Virtualization Oriented Architecture (VOA) Assessments. Entisys’ VOA Assessments provide end-to-end professional services in the planning and deployment of a virtual strategy. The Catbird V-Agent enables VOA Assessments to include security in Entisys’ enterprise consulting and analysis, thereby identifying the security needs of the logical infrastructure right up front, and guaranteeing that any new architecture will contemplate the unique issues surrounding the introduction of virtualization into the data center.