This week, Jersey City, N.J.-based Xceedium released to the channel an update to its access control gateway that gives customers the power to control and audit access to legacy mainframe systems and virtualized systems, two niches for which it has traditionally proven quite complex to manage access

The Xceedium GateKeeper Version 5 will extend its existing access policy enforcement and monitoring across these centralized computing models in order to offer customers a more comprehensive solution that meets the needs of highly-regulated enterprises.

“Access control and audit is our mantra, that is what we do in one hardened appliance is we allow companies to right-size permissions based on (a) zero trust model for both privileged and business users,” says Cheryl Traverse, CEO and president of Xceedium. “We start with (the premise that) you have no privileges, you have no entitlements, you have no security policies and now we're going to build it up from scratch and we do role-based access control.”

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According to Traverse, providing the appropriate controls necessary to comply with requirements from regulations such as PCI and HIPAA has been particularly difficult for enterprises maintaining complex mainframe environments. She sees this latest update as welcome relief for these customers.

“The mainframe environment is a very hard environment to do this with,” Travers says. “But all of these solutions do integrate with existing systems, because they don’t want to throw out their mainframe; it would be very hard to duplicate because some of the people who developed those products are no longer around and it would be very hard to unravel it.”

In order to not only offer the appropriate access controls, but also the necessary tracking and recording to provide to auditors, Xceedium developed specialized recording technology that can translate certain actions into an easily-readable format.

“Mainframes operate with commands and function keys and all of that stuff and we can not only promise you the ability to compartmentalize and contain your users to only those areas of the mainframe that they’re allowed to see, but also deliver the whole audit piece behind the scenes so that when an assessor or auditor comes to call it is in a human readable format,” she says.

Xceedium recently announced plans to shift to a 100 percent channel model. According to Traverse, the company is currently at 75 percent and expects to hit full channel sales by the end of the year. It is especially seeking channel partners in five key verticals: government, finance, telecommunications, health care and pharmaceuticals.