Symark International today announced the acquisition of BeyondTrust, a company that provides least privilege management solutions for Windows platforms, thereby enhancing security and compliance for enterprise customers. The combined organization will operate under the name BeyondTrust®, which reflects the company’s mission to provide a comprehensive product suite that automates Privileged Access Lifecycle Management (PALM) in heterogeneous IT environments. With the addition of patent-pending Windows-based privileged management technologies, the acquisition more than doubles the company’s addressable market and positions the new BeyondTrust for continued growth as a leading IT security provider for the enterprise market.

“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.”

The new BeyondTrust is the first provider of a comprehensive, integrated security and compliance solution for privileged users in Unix, Linux, and Windows environments. The company’s suite of products enable customers to maximize security and achieve compliance objectives, while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing privileged access to critical IT resources. The expansion of its privilege management product families make it ideal for Unix, Linux and Windows desktops and servers, network devices, applications and databases.

"Prior to implementing BeyondTrust, many of our users were logging in with administrative privileges. As a result, we experienced more frequent end user downtime and a greater number of security issues,” said Ben DeGennaro, director of systems support of Boston University. "Thanks to BeyondTrust, we have been able to realize the enormous security and standardization benefits of removing administrator rights and managing privileged access to allow our users to run authorized applications. The solution is already terrific and we look forward to the expanded capabilities that the new BeyondTrust will bring."

“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.”

The BeyondTrust 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 recently announced BeyondTrust PowerSeries Management Console provides a central policy management engine and auditing interface across each of the four stages. With multi-platform coverage for PALM, the BeyondTrust solution helps customers pervasively maximize security to achieve regulatory compliance with increased efficiency for enterprise customers.

The acquisition extends the double-digit growth rate of the combined company and is financially accretive, with minimal customer overlap, resulting in a larger collective global enterprise customer installed-base. All employees from both companies will be retained. Former BeyondTrust CEO John Moyer is now the EVP and general manager of the BeyondTrust Windows Business Unit. Eric Voskuil will become CTO of the combined company, responsible for the technical direction of product strategy.

“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,” said John Moyer, EVP 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.”

A webcast in which John Mutch, CEO of BeyondTrust, will discuss the details of the acquisition and company strategy is scheduled for Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 10:30 a.m. PDT and 4:30 p.m. EDT. Please visit www.beyondtrust.com to register for the webcast.

About BeyondTrust

Founded in 1985, BeyondTrust is the only provider of Privileged Access Lifecycle Management (PALM) solutions for heterogeneous IT environments. The BeyondTrust suite of products reduces the risks associated with insider sabotage and theft of proprietary data, while documenting accountability to support increasing demands of regulatory compliance required across many industries.

PALM is a technology architecture framework consisting of four continual stages running under a centralized automated platform: access to privileged resources, control of privileged resources, monitoring of actions taken on privileged resources, and remediation to revert changes made on privileged IT resources to a known good state.

More than half of the companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rely on BeyondTrust to secure their enterprises. BeyondTrust customers include eight of the world's 10 largest banks, seven of the world's 10 largest aerospace and defense firms, and six of the 10 largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies, as well as renowned universities. BeyondTrust's customer retention rate is over 90 percent. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with East Coast offices in Greater Boston as well as Washington DC, and EMEA offices in London, UK. For more information, visit www.beyondtrust.com.