Fox Technologies announced the extension of BoKS Access Control for Servers to include support for virtual servers. Supported virtual platforms include VMWare ESX, IBM virtual I/O, IBM z-Series mainframes, Xen Virtualization and Solaris Zones.

"While virtualization offers organizations great opportunities to reduce costs and increase business agility, it can also compound access control challenges," stated Per Eliasson, VP of Engineering at FoxT. "The new extension of BoKS Access Control for Servers enables organizations to centralize the management of user populations on both virtual and non-virtual servers, giving organizations the ability to maintain control, while taking advantage of the many business benefits of server virtualization."

Using BoKS Access Control for Servers, organizations can centrally configure, administer, and enforce their security policies and user accounts across diverse UNIX, Linux, and Windows domains. The support for virtualized servers enables organizations using BoKS Access Control for Servers to:

• Enforce common access and authentication policies across virtual and non-virtual servers
• Centrally manage user populations on virtual servers from the same BoKS administration console
• Automatically provision users to virtual machines by adding the machines to managed host groups
• Dynamically register and de-register the hosts for virtual machines that are used sporadically, and automatically update user passwords
• Centrally scan virtual machines for vulnerabilities using BoKS integrity checking
• Centrally monitor configurable files across the network for changes, including files residing on virtual machines
• Centrally log user access to virtual machines for consolidated IT audit reporting

"To reduce their carbon footprint, our customers are consolidating servers in their large data centers into virtualized environments. Giving organizations the ability to control access to both virtual and non-virtual servers using a common solution is another great example of our commitment to provide best-in-class enterprise access control management solutions to the marketplace," said Subhash Tantry, CEO at FoxT. "We want to make sure organizations can take advantage of technology advances, whether it is SSH, smart cards, mobile devices, or virtualization, without jeopardizing the control they need to have over their IT environments."