Securing Virtual Environments Through Partnerships

I’m back from the RSA 2008 Security Show in San Francisco and it was another great year of business development activity for security vendors. It felt like there was a decent amount of end user customers at the show but a lot more vendors touting their wares and looking to do work with each other. I sat and listened to many vendors complain about this and listened to them complain about how they spend money year after year for these shows and rarely get to talk to customers. It felt to them that they hear more from other vendors that come up to their booth asking about partnering or OEM’ing their technology. Well, this does get old pretty fast when you are looking to sell product to justify your existence but for me it was refreshing to talk with other companies about partnering. I had the opportunity to talk to customers also but it was really exciting for me to have partnership discussions.

Why? Well over at Montego Networks where we are focusing on securing a new type of network (one that’s virtual) we believe in security through partnerships. Securing virtual environments is like exploring new frontier or a planned venture to Mars. Research scientists, chemists, doctors, collective minds and in this case a unity of security vendors we feel is the best approach to getting ready for this venture to the new Virtual World.

Virtual Environments need to be studied jointly in order to understand the new security risks, performance impacts and how to effectively secure it.  Montego Networks plans to do that and has announced its HyperVSecurity Alliance at RSA and has joined forces with Cyberoam, Lancope StillSecure and Plixer International in an effort to provide Anti-Malware, Network Access Control, Intrusion Prevention, Behavioral Analysis and Network Monitoring for the virtual environment.

See: 

http://www.montegonetworks.com/node/54

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Partnerships-are-Key-in-Virtualization-Security/ 

By establishing this type of alliance research engineers and vendors will be able to journey to the new Virtual Datacenter with all of the needed components and insight on securing networks. At the epicenter of this alliance is a security frame work designed by Montego Networks that allows various technologies to plug in to the center of the virtual environment which is the switching infrastructure.

Through Montego Networks HyperSwitch, which has the ability see virtual network communication between systems (virtual desktops & servers), a frame work is created that allows for user defined policy that can send traffic off to various places. An example of this is via the HyperSwitches Policy Based Switching engine which allows a user to create a policy that dictates that all email traffic will be directed to an Anti-Virus Gateway or its NetFlow capability which exports flow information to a Behavioral Analysis Engine. 

After these various systems do what they do with the data, they are also able to respond back to the frame work via an API called NSCP (Network Security Control Protocol) to instruct it to tack appropriate action. This could be an IDS system invoking a firewall policy or a Behavioral Analysis system telling the frame work to throttle back (slow down) a users traffic flow. The possibilities are limitless!

So, much like the frontier to the USA from England where we needed Doctors, Lawyers, Law Enforcement, Builders and Farmers, virtualization needs a coalition of security forces that can provide Anti-Virus, IPS, Firewall, Network Monitoring, Behavioral Analysis, etc. etc.   

The goal is to all co-exist in the virtual environment vs. fight for the same piece of land. I think this makes sense because all is needed in the virtual world!

Stay tuned, as the alliance will get bigger and stronger and give customers choice and independence as they look to secure the virtual datacenter. Learn your ABC’s! Anything But 100% Cisco, Let Freedom Ring!