Qualys unveils PCPA, extends cloud platform to support Azure

Claifornia based, enterprise cloud-based security and compliance solutions provider, Qualys, has unveiled a Private Cloud Platform Appliance (PCPA) which offers a compact and economical cloud appliance with managed on-premise security for the medium- sized enterprises. Qualys’ Private Cloud Platform (PCP) claims to provide robust security and compliance functionality with scanning capacity designed to meet the needs of the organizations. PCPA is fully backed by Qualys Cloud Platform which helps in monitoring services and it is securely maintained by Qualys within the organization’s datacenter. It includes a completely assimilated suite of Qualys apps for automating asset discovery, security assessments and compliance management, that includes; AssetView, Vulnerability Management, Continuous Monitoring, Web Application Scanning, Web Application Firewall, Policy Compliance and Security Assessment Questionnaire. It also supports scanners and cloud agents. According to the company, the current version of PCPA allows customers to scan up to 30,000 IPs for vulnerability management and up to 30,000 IPs for policy compliance within a 24 hour period. In addition, PCPA can regularly scan up to 3,000 web applications, depending on their size and complexity.

Philippe Courtot, Chairman and CEO of Qualys, says, “The new PCPA allows us to extend our security and compliance solutions to more effectively compete in environments where our current private cloud offering is too expensive for mid-sized companies.”

What Qualys PCPA offers:

• A compact, cost-effective private cloud solution built to meet the needs of midmarket businesses
• Smaller version of the Qualys PCP family of products with the same security, performance and compliance capabilities
• A turnkey, easy-to-install appliance that meets regulatory data location requirements and internal policies
• End-to-end, in-transit and in-storage data encryption
• A purpose-built hardware appliance form factor, fully managed by Qualys

Qualys to extend its Cloud Platform to support Microsoft Azure

Qualys has also announced that its customers can now extend their centralized, single-pane view of security or compliance posture to Microsoft Azure through an extension of Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance. With this extension Qualys allows Azure users to keep track and identify misconfigured or vulnerable systems and applications, and find solutions for the threats to maintain the security. Courtot, says that many organizations moving assets to cloud environments are lacking the tools to effectively manage security and assess their compliance posture.

“Now, working with Microsoft, we are able to provide our customers with a comprehensive solution that gives them continuous visibility across their entire IT computing infrastructure, including Azure’s cloud environments.”

Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance, pre- certified for Azure, helps the enterprises to combine vulnerability management, policy compliance and web application scanning services on Azure virtual machines into the Qualys platform. It is compatible with both the Classic and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) deployment models and is completely incorporated with the Qualys Cloud Platform, including Classic and Azure Resource Manager Support.

Nicole Herskowitz, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Platform at Microsoft states,”It is important that our customers have the ability to extend centralized security and compliance audits into Microsoft Azure. Qualys’ continuous security platform enables Azure customers to easily and automatically detect and identify misconfigured or vulnerable systems or applications, helping them better face the challenges of growing cloud workloads.”