BeyondTrust Acquires Blackbird Group to Help Organizations Better Protect Identity Investments

SOURCE: BeyondTrust

acquisition adds to the company’s product portfolio to unlock the value of Active Directory as the authoritative identity store

CARLSBAD, Calif. – December 12, 2012 – BeyondTrust, the security industry’s only provider of Context-Aware Security Intelligence, today announced the acquisition of Blackbird Group, a leader in Windows system management. With this addition, BeyondTrust furthers its vision to simplify IT security operations management, while providing customers much-needed context to improve decision-making to protect against both internal and external security threats.

BeyondTrust will leverage the Blackbird product line to drive additional context and awareness around Active Directory and infrastructure components by offering real-time auditing capabilities for both privileged and normal users. This combination will result in accelerated compliance reporting, as organizations will now be able to demonstrate controls of where individuals have access and what they are doing with that access. Real-time auditing events will be fed into BeyondTrust’s risk analytics warehouse – resulting in never-before seen context across the identity infrastructure.

“Having previously led NetPro Computing, I understand the importance Active Directory plays within the enterprise,” said Kevin Hickey, president and chief operating officer at BeyondTrust. “In today’s dynamic IT infrastructure, organizations have to make fundamental shifts in how they manage both identity and security. We’re excited to continue the development of Blackbird’s product line and provide a solid, seamless integrated management approach to Windows infrastructure.”

BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker unlocks the value of Active Directory as an authoritative identity store, providing appropriate access for users, applications and tasks in both on-premise and cloud-based settings. Blackbird Group solutions, coupled with BeyondTrust’s technology, will help organizations better protect identity investments with real-time auditing, recovery and protection.

Key benefits to BeyondTrust’s integrated management approach:

• Cost Savings: Helps minimize deployment costs and administrator training
• Tighter IT Controls: Simplifies compliance and reduces data loss with real-time auditing and alerting across Active Directory and File resources
• Visibility: Audit Intelligence provides more visibility and improved decision making over native tools
• Security: Provides added layer of security and protection with single click rollback and continuous recovery of malicious or inadvertent changes

“Blackbird has been singularly focused on helping our customers demonstrate compliance and drive efficiencies to decrease the cost of IT management,” said Christian Ehrenthal, founder and chief executive officer of Blackbird. “BeyondTrust’s leadership position in the security and compliance markets, along with their impressive sales and marketing leverage, creates this exciting opportunity to join forces.”

BeyondTrust will be hosting a public webcast on Tuesday, December 18th from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PST, open to all those interested in gaining better control of their Active Directory deployments. Any current and former customers of NetPro Computing and Quest Software are invited to attend as well. To register for this webcast, please visit:http://www.beyondtrust.com/bb_acquisition

About BeyondTrust
BeyondTrust is the only security solution vendor providing Context-Aware Security Intelligence, giving customers the visibility and controls necessary to reduce their IT security risks, while at the same time simplifying their compliance reporting.

BeyondTrust offers consistent policy-driven vulnerability and privilege management, role-based access control, monitoring, logging, auditing and reporting to protect internal assets from the inside out. The company’s products empower IT governance to strengthen security, improve productivity, drive compliance, and reduce expense across physical, virtual, mobile and cloud environments.

With more than 25 years of global success, BeyondTrust is the pioneer of both Threat Management and Privileged Identity Management (PIM) solutions for heterogeneous IT environments. More than half of the companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rely on BeyondTrust to secure their enterprises. Customers include eight of the world’s 10 largest banks, eight of the world’s 10 largest aerospace and defense firms, and 7 of the 10 largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies, as well as renowned universities across the globe.
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PR Contact:
Gutenberg Communications for BeyondTrust
Stefanie Cannon
408.827.4361
btprteam@gutenbergpr.com