The Altor VF is a software security appliance that runs in a virtualized environment and enforces security policy on a per virtual machine (VM) basis. Unlike existing firewalls designed for physical networks, the Altor VF virtual firewall can secure Live Migration – a technology designed to trigger automatic movement of VMs across physical servers, but capable of inadvertently moving an application to a less trusted network. The Altor VF was purpose-built for the virtual environment – enabling tighter security policy and greater ease-of-use than existing virtual firewalls adapted from their physical firewall counterparts.
Traditional firewalls not only provide security to physical networks, they also provide visibility to the traffic running through them and export some of that data to 3rd party products to aggregate and correlate data across the network. The Altor VF extends visibility into the virtual environment – providing NetFlow statistics, Sys Log, and other network statistics on a per application basis and exporting that data to 3rd party products such as those from ArcSight and Mazu Networks (Please see separate releases for details).
Through its partnership with Juniper Networks, the Altor VF enables Juniper IDP appliances to extend their protection into the virtual environment (Please see separate releases for details). “Our other network security vendors did not offer viable options, especially regarding VMotion.
“With Altor’s solution we now have total visibility into, and far greater control over, our virtualized infrastructure,” said Nicholas Portolese, senior manager, data center operations at Nielsen Mobile.
“IT administrators are challenged with the differences between virtual and physical networks, and recognize that new approaches are necessary to meet the management challenges of virtual infrastructure,” said Mark Bowker, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
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