Altor Networks: Security, Virtually Speaking

Company:

Headquarters: Redwood Shores, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Altor Virtual Firewall 3.0

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: 25 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Altor Networks gives partners a competitive edge as customers increasingly adopt a virtualized environment.

The Lowdown: More companies are migrating toward virtualized IT environments in an effort to cut costs and reduce energy consumption. But virtualized environments also pose problems and raise questions from auditors when companies attempt to adhere to compliance regulations.

Altor Networks has an answer to that problem.

"PCI, SOX, HIPAA -- we help those initiatives in the virtualized environments," said Johnnie Konstantas, vice president of marketing for Altor Networks.

The company specializes in traditional security offerings -- firewall and intrusion detection -- but for virtualized environments.

But the challenge for customers is steeper than just facing off against menacing compliance auditors. Customers are also seeing a sharp uptick in security threats targeting virtualized IT environments as the technology becomes more ubiquitous in the enterprise. Meanwhile, badly configured virtual machines (VMs) often leave a gaping security hole for malware to come right in, Altor executives said.

"Virtualization is tricky to secure," Konstantas said. "The proliferation of malware on a bad configuration is something that can happen super-fast in a virtualized environment."

Consequently, customers require security products that protect each VM in a highly granular way, she said.

Altor Networks' flagship Altor Virtual Firewall (VF) combines a VMware VMsafe firewall with virtual-aware IDS, designed to stop malware outbreaks that can rapidly infect virtual machines. The product is also designed to eliminate blind spots on the network caused by lack of visibility between host servers and VMs. Plus, it gives customers the ability to sail through compliance audits by providing the ability to filter, monitor and report virtual traffic.

Those features are attractive to an array of verticals that span the segments, including financial, insurance, academia, government and military organizations, Konstantas said.

For partners, Altor VF greatly enhances their portfolio and gives them a leg up on competitors offering traditional physical or software security as more companies adopt a virtual environment, Konstantas said.

"What resellers get is another arrow in their quiver to round out security solutions they bring to a customer," she said.