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!