BalaBit’s Shell Control Box is verified as Citrix Ready with Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x

BalaBit IT Security says that Shell Control Box, the company's Privileged Identity Management (PIM) tool, has been verified as Citrix Ready. The Citrix Ready program helps customers identify third-party solutions that complement and enhance Citrix virtualization, networking and cloud services solutions to deliver mobile workspaces. Shell Control Box completed a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop 7.6. Technology platforms change often with new features and product builds, and BalaBit has quickly delivered verified interoperability with XenDesktop and XenApp 7.x versions, allowing its customers to benefit from the latest enhancements.

BalaBit’s Shell Control Box is an activity monitoring appliance that controls access to an organization's remote servers, virtual desktops, or networking devices, and records the activities of the users accessing these systems. Shell Control Box works by monitoring and recording employee transactions. These recorded audit trails can be replayed like a movie to review events exactly as they occurred. The audit trail is indexed, allowing drill down searches for events, text and characters.
Shell Control Box supports Citrix HDX to access virtual desktop and application server infrastructures designed by Citrix. Shell Control Box is the first client and server independent solution that can transparently control and audit XenDesktop and XenApp 7.6 deployments. In addition, Citrix users will enjoy Shell Control Box's ease of deployment and operation, control granularity and auditing quality.

"Citrix consistently delivers the leading technology to enable the most advanced mobile workspaces in the market, providing virtualization, mobility management, networking and cloud services. At BalaBit, we are eager to adjust our Shell Control Box technology as quickly as possible to adapt to the continuous innovation needed to have our product verified as Citrix Ready,” said Zoltán Györk?, CEO of BalaBit. “Shell Control Box is an external, fully transparent proxy gateway that is completely independent from the clients and the servers. There is no modification to server and client applications as the technology integrates directly into the existing Citrix infrastructure with much more scalability than agent-based tools do."

Additional benefits of Shell Control Box for Citrix 7.x customers include:
· Independent device – the monitoring system is fully separated from the monitored user – no possibility for manipulation and no need to install and maintain agents on the production servers
· Supports XenApp, XenDesktop, SSH, RDP, HTTP(s), Telnet and VNC protocols – audits heterogeneous IT environments including network devices, firewalls, Citrix/Windows/UNIX/Linux servers, etc.
· Provides granular access policy enforcement to servers (e.g. time policy, file transfer control, etc.)
· Monitors shared and privileged account activity, as well (e.g. “Administrator”, “root”, etc.)
· Prevents malicious actions (e.g. launch of an unwanted application) from being executed on the server
· Supports custom activity reports – helps in compliance driven projects, where reporting is a strong requirement
· Audit-trails are stored in a tamperproof (encrypted, signed and time-stamped) way – meets compliance requirements