Elemental’s Latest Release Enhances Functionality Of Its Security Compliance Management Products

SAN MATEO, Calif. May 16, 2005 Elemental Security, Inc.?”, a company pioneering new technology in enterprise information security, today announced the next release of the Elemental Compliance System, further enabling enterprises to satisfy their internal and regulatory compliance requirements and measurably improve upon their security.

Elemental delivers the world’s only product that unifies policy management, host configuration and network access control in one seamlessly integrated offering. For the first time, enterprises can easily express cross-platform security policies that affect individual computers and their behavior on the network, gather meaningful up-to-date information to compare to established metrics, and selectively enforce policies across a diverse, dynamic environment. Security compliance has become a top priority for enterprises due to pressures from increasing frequency and severity of security breaches, and from regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Addressing customer response, this newest version of Elemental’s security compliance management product delivers increased platform coverage, including agent support for Win2000 desktops, Win2000 and Win2003 servers, and Red Hat EL 3.0. Elemental also offers a deeper policy library, including templates for SOX and additional Windows OS and server applications.

“In pulling together capabilities from several security segments, Elemental’s solution is differentiated from the pack in that it addresses the complete lifecycle of security compliance management, and does so with powerful grouping capabilities useful in dynamic environments,” said Andrew Braunberg, senior analyst of information security, Current Analysis, Inc. “It is good to see the company building out its policy library of pre-built security policies and templates for specific regulations, as well as expanding its platform support. Elemental is emerging at an opportune time to exploit the growing corporate need for security policy compliance solutions.”

Elemental’s new release significantly increases its supported scalability and includes other key enhancements, such as automated remediation of host and application configuration policies, additional reports to further assist security administrators and compliance officers in making informed decisions about managing security policies, and multiple enhancements to further simplify the processes of managing policies throughout their compliance lifecycle. Additionally, by adding support for Active Directory integration, Elemental’s powerful dynamic grouping capabilities are now extended to enable organizations to map policies to users based on their organizational affiliations and permissions.

“This next version of the Elemental Compliance System increases the gap between the security compliance management functionality we deliver, and other offerings in the market,” said Elemental CEO Peter Watkins. “Elemental is extremely flexible and responsive to our customers’ needs. We are pleased to quickly roll out this new release with expanded functionality, all based on customer feedback and requirements.”

Elemental approaches security compliance by uniquely placing an emphasis on policy. Elemental delivers a Unified Policy Infrastructure, tightly coupling the expression, monitoring, and enforcement of security policies across heterogeneous platforms and across multiple layers of individual computers (including by OS, application, hardware, software, and network activity). Powering this unified framework is Fuel?”, the first and only purpose built security policy language. With no programming experience required, organizations can easily express policies in a manner that more closely resembles how they were written in a security policy document, without worrying about implementation details or platform-specific issues.

Elemental enables important security compliance management capabilities, including dynamic host groupings that keep pace with ongoing network changes and provide a view of the environment that reflects clear business process, organizational, and IT administrative context. Dynamic groupings are derived from the rich set of information learned from the Elemental agents about their host computer and other computers on their network segment that describes in detail the configuration and activity of machines. As individual computers experience changes in their configuration or behavior, the dynamic grouping mechanism automatically assigns them into groups and immediately deploys the appropriate policies and access controls for those groups.

Availability

Sold directly and through leading channel partners, Elemental’s new ,,product line is available this week. Contact the company at www.elementalsecurity.com for more, including sales and pricing information.

The Elemental Compliance System

The Elemental Compliance System is an enterprise security software solution that enables organizations to express, monitor, and enforce security policies for any computer connecting to the network. It is a client-server security system that provides broad visibility into all hosts in the enterprise and the means to control or contain them through auto-deployed security policies. The system consists of the Elemental server and Elemental agents running on workstations and server hosts throughout a network. Elemental’s architecture is unique in its ability to detect, monitor and control hosts with or without Elemental agents running on them.

About Elemental
Elemental Security is a pioneer in the Security Compliance Management market. Elemental’s products address enterprises’ need to centrally manage the security compliance of all computers in their environment. Elemental provides unified visibility and control to manage dynamic computing environments, enabling enterprises to satisfy compliance requirements and measurably improve their security. Founded in December 2002, Elemental is a privately held company backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield and Sequoia Capital. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., and has regional offices throughout the U.S. Go to http://www.elementalsecurity.com for more information