With announcement of a technology alliance with VMware, Tripwire didn’t announce new product, but instead, voiced its intention to ramp up its VMware management capabilities.
Tripwire has monitored changes in virtualized instantiations before this, but the tracking has been reactive in nature. In essence, it documents that a change has occurred in a VMware container, but it doesn’t provide any tooling for applying policy-based management of change in these images. The goal would enable customers to manage their VMware partitions based on their own body of best practices or formal policies for how to configure them.
The first milestone will be release of PCI (Payment card Industry) compliance for VMware partitions. That refers to the credit card industry’s code of privacy protection for customers, based on standards developed by the Center for Internet Security (CIS). The other announcement concerned a change of focus for Tripwire, which until now has concentrate on tracking change in IT infrastructure.
Now it plans to move up the stack, to monitor change in application software configurations. The initial targets will be Microsoft Exchange and Internet Information Server (IIS). According to Dan Schoenbaum, vice president of development, this will be the first of a series of announcements where Tripwire will begin actively instrumenting applications. He mentioned that ERP and other enterprise apps would form the logical next step. Some customers are already using our tools to monitor elements of SAP, he said.
