Altor Networks
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Altor Networks, Inc., a
Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including Router (computing), routers, Network switch, switches, network management so ...
company, is a 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 compromises and create roles-based security policies. Security policies could be continuously enforced on individual virtual machines (VMs), even as they moved throughout the virtualized data center. Headquartered in Redwood Shores,
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, Altor was founded in 2007 by security and networking experts from
Check Point Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is an Israeli multinational provider of software and combined hardware and software products for IT security, including network security, endpoint security, cloud security, mobile security, data security ...
Software,
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and
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, and has received funding from
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, and
Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including Router (computing), routers, Network switch, switches, network management so ...
. On December 6, 2010 Juniper Networks announced it had acquired Altor Networks for $95 million in cash.


Background

Computer virtualization has been in use on
mainframe computers A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...
since the IBM VM/370 platform released 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. VMware company history It was estimated that 50% of workloads would be running inside virtualized environments by 2012 Whenever virtualization technology includes a
hypervisor A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) or virtualizer, is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...
, then a
virtual network In computing, network virtualization is the process of combining hardware and software network resources and network functionality into a single, software-based administrative entity, a virtual network. Network virtualization involves platform v ...
can be created within the hypervisor layer to transparently network all the virtual machines operating under a single virtualized environment. This "
virtual network In computing, network virtualization is the process of combining hardware and software network resources and network functionality into a single, software-based administrative entity, a virtual network. Network virtualization involves platform v ...
" provides all the benefits and administrative responsibilities of a physical network, with the addition of some new challenges. The founders of Altor Networks became aware early on that adoption of virtualization technologies in data centers had been accelerating for many years and several problems in virtual network security in particular became apparent: * The virtual environment had some unique security characteristics and needs; * Those needs were not being addressed effectively by IT security vendors; and * Traditional security technologies were ill-equipped to protect virtualized IT resources. It was decided that the way to address these 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 An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a device or software application that monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations. Any intrusion activity or violation is typically either reported to an administrator or collec ...
appliances, or any associated
VLAN A virtual local area network (VLAN) is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer ( OSI layer 2).IEEE 802.1Q-2011, ''1.4 VLAN aims and benefits'' In this context, virtual refers to a ...
rerouting out of the virtual network to the physical network and back again.


Products

Altor released the Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) as a tool to monitor and analyze virtual network traffic in March 2008, followed 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. The release of Altor VF 4.0 now leverages virtual machine introspection to bring visibility to internal virtual machine states for compliance assessment and automated security enforcement. * Altor VNSA ''(Virtual Network Security Analyzer)'', released March 2008 (now part of Altor VF) * Altor VF 1.0 ''(Altor Virtual Firewall)'', released October 2008 * Altor VF 2.0, released March 2009 * Altor VF 3.0, released September 2009 * Altor v4.0, released June 2010 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.


See also

*
Mocana Mocana (founded 2002) is a San Jose-based company that focuses on and embedded system security for industrial control systems and the Internet of Things (IoT). One of its main products, the IoT Security Platform, is a high-performance, ultra-opt ...
* Lastline


References


Further reading


"40,000 Firewalls! Help Please!?"

SANS Intrusion Detection FAQs

"Intrusion Protection and Detection within the Virtual Environment"


External links

* {{Juniper Networks Computer security companies Juniper Networks Companies based in Redwood Shores, California Computer companies established in 2007 2007 establishments in California 2010 mergers and acquisitions