Xceedium, Inc., was a

network security Network security consists of the policies, processes and practices adopted to prevent, detect and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources. Network security involves th ...

software company providing privileged identity and access management solutions which was subsequently acquired by

CA Technologies CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

. Their software is used to control and manage the risks that privileged users, privileged accounts (admin, root, etc.) and privileged credentials (passwords, certificates, digital keys, etc.) pose to systems and data.

History

Xceedium Inc., was founded in 2000 by David Van and David Cheung when the company split from Lucid Technologies Group, a company created in 1995. The company developed software for internal use that provided its consultants with secure remote access to sensitive customer systems. This software became the core technology for the ''Xceedium GateKeeper'' product. Xceedium's products were aimed at mid-large sized enterprises in vertical market segments including

banking A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets. Because ...

and

financial services Financial services are the economic services provided by the finance industry, which encompasses a broad range of businesses that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, accountancy companies, ...

retail Retail is the sale of goods and Service (economics), services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturing, manufacturers, dire ...

, telecom,

healthcare Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health pro ...

energy In physics, energy (from Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, ''enérgeia'', “activity”) is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of ...

and

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government i ...

agencies. They marketed their product through a global partner network. Xceedium's headquarters was originally located in Jersey City, New Jersey until it relocated to Northern Virginia in March 2011. Initial funding for the venture-backed company came from ArrowPath Venture Partners and Nationwide Mutual Capital. Xceedium was a private,

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

backed company with funding from ArrowPath Venture Partners and Nationwide Mutual Capital. In June 2012, Xceedium closed a $12 million financing led by ArrowPath Venture Partners bringing the total capital raised to $25 million Xceedium was acquired by

in August 2015.

Products

''Xceedium Gatekeeper'' was the first product designed by the company, initially built with out-of-band and

in-band In telecommunications, in-band signaling is the sending of control information within the same band or channel used for data such as voice or video. This is in contrast to out-of-band signaling which is sent over a different channel, or even ...

KVM for remote IT control. The ''GateKeeper'' software was updated to provide network-based access control and session recording/playback. Later, ''GateKeeper'' and ''Cloakware Password Authority'' (a product acquired from Irdeto) were integrated to form ''Xceedium Xsuite''. The main capabilities of ''Xceedium Xsuite'' were: role-based access control, command filtering (white/black list), user containment (prevents SSH based leapfrogging or RDP hopping to unauthorized nodes), session monitoring/policy violation alerting, session recording and playback and privileged password vaulting and management. The ''Xceedium Xsuite'' platform enabled organizations to apply the

principle of least privilege In information security, computer science, and other fields, the principle of least privilege (PoLP), also known as the principle of minimal privilege (PoMP) or the principle of least authority (PoLA), requires that in a particular abstraction la ...

, which holds that systems and individuals should only be granted access to the resources and commands that are absolutely necessary for the required task. According to the company, ''Xsuite'' limited access for privileged users to the systems and commands for which they are explicitly authorized (

Role-based access control In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) or role-based security is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users. It is an approach to implement mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control ...

). It also monitored the activities of privileged users and sent alerts when individuals attempted to violate a policy. The system recorded privileged user sessions such as

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

, RDP, SSH, and VNC and provided a mechanism to replay recorded session for investigations and forensics. ''Xsuite Cloud for

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

(AWS)'' was introduced as an extension to the ''Xsuite'' platform. It provided privileged identity and access management for standalone AWS implementations or hybrid architectures that can include infrastructure nodes (e.g., servers, network devices, storage devices, security systems) running on: AWS

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment o ...

(EC2), private clouds, as virtual machines or traditional single OS/hardware scenarios Following the acquisition of Xceedium by CA, ''Xceedium Xsuite'' was integrated into the CA product range as ''CA Privileged Access Manager''.

References

{{Reflist Defunct computer companies of the United States CA Technologies Computer security software Companies established in 2000 Companies disestablished in 2015 2015 mergers and acquisitions