Coalfire Systems, Inc. today announced that it has established the VMware Compliance Lab, a center of excellence and that designs, tests and promotes IT security best practices and audit guidelines for virtualized computing environments.

The VMware Compliance Lab, housed in Coalfire’s Seattle office, provides partners and end users with the information and tools they need to expedite the audit process and ensure compliance with major IT security standards, including PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, GLBA, FISMA and FedRAMP. As a fully-independent IT Governance, Risk an Compliance firm, Coalfire gathers reference architecture and controls data from VMware, tests those controls in both the lab and the field, and issues guidance documents that security professionals can use to manage risk and compliance. In addition to VMware products, the Lab also houses and tests controls information from other products built on the VMware reference architecture, including solutions from EMC, RSA, HP, Symantec, McAfee and LogRhythm.

“Coalfire is partnering with VMware and other industry leaders to promote security and compliance in virtualized environments,” said Rick Dakin, CEO, co-founder and senior strategist at Coalfire. “Our lab provides a clearinghouse of un-biased, tested and proven best practices, and as those best practices are adopted in the field, end users will be able to streamline and risk and compliance efforts.”

”Coalfire’s thought leadership and IT audit expertise enables our partners and customers to confidently virtualize highly regulated workloads and meet their regulatory requirements. The guidance provided by Coalfire coupled with VMware’s proven leadership and ecosystem enables enterprises to use their virtualization investment as they move business critical applications to the cloud,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances.