Healthcare providers may not yet have a solid definition for ‘meaningful use’ of IT, but they do know security will play a role. With Monday’s acquisition of BeyondTrust, Symark International is looking to position itself in that field.
Symark, based in Agoura Hills, Calif., provides security administration solutions for Unix/Linux environments, with PowerBroker, PowerPasword and PowerKeeper software suites. BeyondTrust, of Portsmouth, N.H., focuses on privileged access lifecycle management (PALM) services for the Windows platform. Symark officials say the deal more than doubles the company’s addressable market and gives them a full platform of PALM services for IT environments.
“It’s really a very nice, elegant marriage,” said Matt Collier, Symark’s vice president of worldwide operations. “For us, this enhances our capabilities to protect important information,” a key component as the healthcare field moves toward adoption of electronic health records.
With Monday’s announcement, Symark takes the BeyondTrust name.
“BeyondTrust is the first acquisition in our aggressive but pragmatic growth strategy to consolidate complementary, cross-platform technologies to meet customer’s IT privilege management needs,” said John Mutch, CEO of the new BeyondTrust. “We see continued market acknowledgement and validation of increasing security and compliance risks from loosely managed IT privileges, as well as the need for a centralized management solution to systematically mitigate those risks across heterogeneous computing devices. With the extension to the Windows platform, this acquisition cements our leadership in the Privileged Access Lifecycle Management space.”
“BeyondTrust grew its revenue by 75 percent over the past year by addressing the need for Windows-based enterprises across many industries to manage user privileges,” added John Moyer, executive vice president and general manager of the BeyondTrust Windows Business Unit. “Combining these Windows capabilities with privileged user access management for Unix and Linux platforms enables the new BeyondTrust to provide customers with a uniquely comprehensive range of options for simplifying security and compliance while reducing costs.”
The company’s PALM solution framework consists of four interconnected privilege management stages running under a centralized and automated platform: access to privileged resources, control of privileged resources, monitoring of actions taken on privileged resources, and remediation of undesirable changes made to privileged resources. The company’s BeyondTrust PowerSeries Management Console provides a central policy management engine and auditing interface across each of the four stages.
According to Collier, Symark has some healthcare clients, and is looking to “put a stake in the ground” in the healthcare field with the BeyondTrust acquisition, where an estimated 80 percent of applications are run on the Windows platform. By offering an expanded suite of identity access management services, he said, the new company hopes to attract healthcare customers who are adopting or enhancing their IT platforms to meet the government’s demands for interoperability.
“Organizations continue to struggle with excessive user privilege as it remains the primary attack point for data breaches and unauthorized transactions,” said Mark Diodati, senior identity and security analyst at Burton Group. “As a result, they are looking for holistic solutions that provide consistent authentication, auditing and privilege analysis across the Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS platforms.”
