| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Virtual network security |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Headquarters | Redwood Shores, California, USA |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO |
| Products | Virtual security appliance, Virtual firewall |
| Revenue | not stated |
| Net income | not stated |
| Employees | under 50 (2010) in 2 countries |
| Website | www.altornetworks.com |
Altor Networks, Inc., a Juniper Networks Company, is the leading innovator and provider of security for virtual data centers and clouds. The company developed the world’s first firewall purpose-built for virtual networks, a software security "appliance" that runs in a virtualized environment and enforces security policy on a per-virtual-machine basis. Data center administrators could pinpoint a broad range of virtual network security comprises and easily create roles-based security policies. Security policies could be continuously enforced on individual virtual machines (VM), even as they moved throughout the virtualized data center.
Now in its fourth release, Altor’s hypervisor-based software is a comprehensive security package featuring integrated intrusion detection (IDS), VM Introspection, security automation, and compliance assessment. Recently named the RSA Conference Innovator of the Year and a Gartner Cool Vendor, Altor delivers virtualization security solutions that protect some of the world’s most demanding virtual environments, including those of media giant Nielsen Corporation and the U.S. Army Human Resources Command.
Headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif., Altor was founded in 2007 by security and networking experts from Check Point Software, Cisco and Oracle Corporation, and has received funding from Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Foundation capital, and Juniper Networks. On December 6, 2010 Juniper Networks announced it has acquired Altor Networks.[1]
Contents |
Computer virtualization has been in use on mainframe computers since the IBM VM/370 platform [2] release in the early 1970s. VM technology became more widely available with the release of VMware Workstation in 1999, and the VMWare server line in 2001 [3]. It has been estimated that 50% of workloads will be running inside virtualized environments by as early as 2012 [4]
Whenever virtualization technology includes a hypervisor then a virtual network can be created within the hypervisor layer to transparently network all the virtual machines operating under a single virtualized environment. This "virtual network" provides all the benefits and administrative responsibilities of a physical network, with the addition of some new challenges [5]. The founders of Altor Networks became aware early on that adoption of virtualization technologies in data centers had been accelerating for many years [6] and several problems in virtual network security in particular became immediately apparent:
It was decided that the way to address these unique challenges was to provide a solution that operated entirely within the virtualized environment as a purpose-built appliance to provide firewalling and other security services directly inside the virtual network without recourse to external hardware firewalls or intrusion detection appliances, or any associated VLAN rerouting out of the virtual network to the physical network and back again.
Altor released the Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) as a tool to monitor and analyze virtual network traffic in March 2008, followed on by the Altor VF 1.0 (which included the VNSA as a module) in October 2008. Integrated signature-based network intrusion detection was incorporated into the Altor VF 3.0 release in September 2009. And the recent release of Altor v4.0 now leverages virtual machine introspection to bring X-ray-like visibility to internal virtual machine states for accurate compliance assessment and automated security enforcement.
Currently Altor Networks offers a virtual security appliance for use within VMware ESX, with ongoing efforts to add support for Xen/Citrix and Microsoft HyperV/Viridian platforms.
Altor Networks accolades include:
"40,000 Firewalls! Help Please!?"
SANS Intrusion Detection FAQs
"Intrusion Protection and Detection within the Virtual Environment"
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