Altor Networks wins RSA Innovation Sandbox

Posted By Texiwill on March 4, 2010

While at RSA Conference I visited the RSA Innovation Sandbox and noticed that three out of ten finalists were virtualization security vendors:

Altor Networks
Catbird Security
HyTrust

Altor Networks won the Innovation Sandbox contest and all that goes with it. Congratulations to them, but Altor’s win is actually a win for all virtualization security players. It shows that virtualization security is extremely important to the data center as well as moving forward to the cloud.

Altor’s latest iteration of their product has some incredible improvements that adds to the authoritativeness of their policies and protections. The latest version looks within the VM to determine what ports should be allowed to be opened, and therefore how to improve the overall policy. Altor VF3 is now using even more of the vSphere APIs not just VMsafe-Net.

This solves a very well known problem with firewalls in that they are not normally ‘authoritative’ about what policy to apply, but have to rely upon the administrator to properly input rules.

We have discussed in the past that virtualziation allows you to be Authoritative about what VMs do so that the learning process is reduced and without human intervention. This has now become a reality with respect to the firewall.

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Categories: Virtualization Security
Tags: Altor Networks, catbird, HyTrust, Innovation Sandbox, RSA, VMSafe

About the author

Edward L. Haletky is the author of VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment as well as VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers. Edward owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, network consulting and development and The Virtualization Practice where he is also an Analyst. Edward is the Moderator and Host of the Virtualization Security Podcast as well as a guru and moderator for the VMware Communities Forums, providing answers to security and configuration questions. Edward is working on new books on Virtualization.

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