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Breakthrough Security Solutions Making Virtual Networks More Secure Than Physical Network Infrastructures

(March 18, 2008)-- Altor Networks, pioneering a new class of virtual network security solutions, today announced the launch of the industry’s first virtual switch traffic analyzer and Virtual Network Firewall. Each system supports multi-vendor virtual platforms and is purpose-built to make virtualized data centers more secure than their physical counterparts.

Altor’s Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) and Virtual Network Firewall (VNF) provide unprecedented visibility into virtual switch traffic and control over virtual machines (VMs) being deployed by enterprises, government agencies and organizations in regulated industries. Altor’s VNSA and VNF solutions enable network administrators and security professionals to apply security best practices for virtual networks and help companies meet increasingly stringent HIPAA, PCI and SOX regulatory compliance requirements — at a fraction of the cost of legacy security products.

“One of the key drivers for virtualizing our data center is operational agility,” said Nicholas Portolese, senior manager, data center operations, with Nielsen Mobile, the world’s largest provider of syndicated consumer research to the telecom and mobile media markets. “Altor Networks’ Virtual Network Security Analyzer provides us, for the first time, with crucial insight into our virtual switch traffic with real-time and historical monitoring and analysis capabilities. This enables us to weed out, analyze and report on network bottlenecks caused by a number of sources including unwanted protocols, multicast and broadcast service announcements.”

“Most people don’t realize security virtualization has lagged far behind virtualization of storage, networking, and servers,” said Andreas M. Antonopoulos, senior vice president and founding partner at Nemertes Research. “The lack of suitable security is actually thwarting more widespread adoption of virtualization in some cases. Ironically, traditional static security solutions are subverting some of the operational return-on-investment offered by virtualization such as live migration.”

This “security gap” can be traced to the shortcomings of traditional security solutions that include legacy firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, operating system firewalls and VLANs. Aging firewalls and IDS/IPSs that were designed to defend static, perimeter-based physical networks have no visibility into VM traffic and control over virtual networks — nor do they integrate easily with virtual network management systems. VLANs lack virtual switch traffic inspection capabilities, are complex to manage, and restrict usage of VM migration tools like VMotion. And OS firewalls suffer from lack of central management, inconsistency across differing operating systems and poor support for legacy OSes.

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