Not put off by the challenge of naming itself with a potentially unpronounceable moniker, Xcitium (pronounced ex-city-um) was formerly known as Comodo Security Solutions. A staunch advocate of cloud-native security best practices, the company’s ZeroDwell technology uses CPU visualization techniques to isolate and remove threats.

This is not endpoint management in the historical sense of the term, this is what we could probably call preemptive endpoint containment and managed endpoint detection and response (EDR). The company has now partnered with AccuKnox to create a joint solution that aims to protect organizations across endpoints, cloud and network applications. 

CNAPP Snap!

AccuKnox is a flexible cloud-native protection solution that can be deployed in an on-premises configuration or SaaS model. While we would classify Xcitium as a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) company, Accuknox also falls into this classification but with some nuanced differences, including a more marked-out set of capabilities related to cloud/Kubernetes identity and entitlement management (CIEM/KIEM).

Working to now deliver what will be a single solution for enterprises who want to sign up for the full cadre of services on offer here, Xcitium endpoints and network detection and response technology will now be dovetailed with AccuKnox CNAPP capabilities to deliver security and compliance for multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments and workloads. 

With remote and hybrid work obviously on the rise, organizations must safeguard not just endpoints but their entire cloud and network footprint. By integrating Xcitium’s endpoint protection and AccuKnox’s cloud-based controls, the firms say customers can achieve consistent security, visibility and governance across today’s distributed IT landscapes.

“We are thrilled to partner with a modern cloud-native CNAPP innovator like AccuKnox. [The company’s] integrated offering, flexible deployment options [and] dedication to R&D [make it] an ideal match for augmenting Xcitium’s ZeroDwell EDR, Monitoring, Alerting and Investigation (MDR) and Extended Cloud and Network Monitoring (XDR) solutions suite,” said Ken Levine, chief executive officer of Xcitium.

Core on KubeArmor

Xcitium’s platform also extends to firewall (FW), anti-virus (AV) and so-called next-gen anti-virus (NGAV), host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) and 24/7/365 human-led managed SOC monitoring, alerting and investigation. AccuKnox is a core contributor to the Kubernetes runtime security platform, KubeArmor, a project that has been adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and now lists some 700,000+ downloads.

As well as automated prioritization of vulnerabilities, AccuKnox said it offers support for modern workloads (i.e., ones that Kubernetes orchestrated or un-orchestrated) and traditional workloads (virtual machine, bare metal). The platform is delivered in a developer-centric, shift-left DevSecOps model and enjoys integration with multiple tools. It is what the company classifies as a means of addressing an organization’s specific security needs through security orchestration, automation and response; continuous application security testing (SOARCAST).