Pivot3 Achieves Common Criteria Certification

Pivot3, Inc. completed the Common Criteria certification process for its vSTAC OS v7.5 hyperconverged infrastructure software platform under an Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2+.

Pivot3 is the only HCI vendor with a current Common Criteria certification for data protection products, which will make it possible for governments and private sector organizations around the world to adopt HCI more broadly with the confidence the solution meets internationally recognized and security standards.

As government agencies work to comply with the Data Center Optimization Initiative enacted in August 2016, HCI has emerged as the solution for agencies seeking efficient, scalable and cost-effective infrastructure.

Pivot3 has seen growth with customers across all branches of the US government as well as contractors, from providing small-form infrastructures at the tactical edge to supporting a modernization and consolidation initiative for a large Department of Defense agency.

The US government mandates Common Criteria certification of security products for federal purchases, with all federal agencies required to purchase commercial security products that have met specified third-party assurance requirements and have been tested by an accredited national laboratory.

Common Criteria is an internationally-recognized ISO standard (ISO/IEC 15408) that defines a common framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of security features and capabilities of IT security products. The certification process consists of several predetermined evaluation assurance levels, each one more stringent than the last, with product security testing performed by independent third-party accredited laboratories.

“Pivot3 is our trusted partner in providing hyperconverged solutions to our federal customer base,” said Kenneth Hilton, GM and VP operations, Trace Systems, Inc., a provider of telecommunications, networking, cybersecurity, and IT services to the United States Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Department of Homeland Security. “This certification further enhances the value Pivot3 provides by ensuring their product delivers the most stringent security and data protection standards.“

Corsec Security, Inc., in product security requirements hardening, assisted Pivot3 with its Common Criteria evaluation. This partnership helped streamline the certification effort to complete the process in record time.

“Attaining this Common Criteria certification is a testament to Pivot3’s commitment and adherence to U.S. and international government standards on product security, as well as compliance to the recent presidential Executive Order on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure, which requires completion of the Common Criteria certification,” said Darcy Dinga, EVP, Corsec Security.

“Our government and private sector customers around the globe depend on Pivot3 for performance, scale and efficiency. The Common Criteria certification provides them with an additional level of assurance that their HCI partner is providing the highest possible security,” said Ron Nash, CEO, Pivot3. “This accreditation not only saves customers time and resources in the selection process, but also upholds their respective security standards and performs securely as promised.“

Pivot3’s vSTAC HCI Platform
As a Common Criteria EAL2+ certified data protection product, vSTAC provides twice the performance, delivers up to 94% usable storage capacity at scale, and consumes only a fraction of the operating overhead compared to other HCI platforms. Unlike most HCI solutions that restrict resource consumption to each node, Pivot3 allows IT to do more with less with a distributed scale-out architecture that pools each HCI node’s compute and storage capacity for consumption by every VM and application. Pivot3’s patented erasure coding provides the HA and resiliency to maintain business performance even during degraded-mode conditions. vSTAC provides interoperability with existing infrastructures, which lets IT organizations run the customized, non-virtualized applications common in large government agencies with the same agility and economics as virtual workloads.