Catbird, the pioneer in security and compliance for virtual, cloud and physical networks, today announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with Forsythe, a leading IT infrastructure consultant and integrator. Forsythe will offer Catbird's vSecurity software to bring PCI, HIPAA and SOX compliance to its customers who are moving to virtual and cloud-based infrastructure.

"Security and compliance are critical components for all IT infrastructure. As environments are virtualized, new risks are introduced due to a loss of process control across four change dimensions," says David Poarch, VP, security of Forsythe. "Catbird has developed a solution specifically for virtualized environments that delivers dynamic, elastic security and integrated compliance for sensitive and mission-critical applications."

"Recent guidance from PCI, NIST and SANS proves that relying on traditional physical firewalls and physical network inspection is risky and will not pass an audit. Catbird vSecurity was built from the ground up to do virtual and cloud security better, faster and cheaper," said Edmundo Costa, Catbird CEO. "Forsythe's extensive experience in integrating not only virtualized solutions, but also physical infrastructure solutions, across security, servers, networks and storage make them a strong partner in helping our virtualization clients with their security needs."

Catbird vSecurity harnesses the power of virtualization to deliver the industry's most comprehensive security and compliance solution for virtual and cloud systems. vSecurity covers the gaps endemic to traditional security devices, introducing a new model for data center security.  By correlating data and events from across all virtual hosts, vSecurity enforces controls on virtual machines, their network attributes, virtual networks, and the switch fabric – protecting the whole data plane.

Catbird pioneered cost-effective security automation through dynamic and elastic logical security zoning: TrustZones. vSecurity includes vCompliance integrated compliance workflow and reporting, the industry's only real time compliance solution for PCI, FISMA, DIACAP and HIPAA and other important 3rd party standards. With predefined templates for easy configuration, ensuring virtual data center compliance is as simple as a button-click.

"Virtualization security opens the door for mission-critical applications that have traditionally been left out of virtualization roll-outs," added Costa. "vSecurity will provide Forsythe customers with the ability to meet the new requirements and maximize their virtualization and cloud ROI by being able to include in their deployment plans most applications that were previously excluded, such as, for example, applications that handle PCI data."