Altor Networks has announced that Winsert has selected the Altor VF virtual firewall to secure its virtual environment and mitigate an attack before it could hit their network. After installing Altor VF, Winsert was able to quickly secure its virtual machines (VMs); and for the first time had real time visibility and rule-based control of packet flow in and out of each VM.

Winsert, the leading developer and tester of alloy solutions, was using physical servers to support all of their IT applications including Exchange, DNS, file backup, SQL database and an ERP system The company moved to a virtualized environment to achieve high availability and protect against catastrophic failure.

“After moving our production applications to a virtualized environment we realized that we lacked security; I had no visibility into what was going on between VMs and a virtual attack could take down our network,” said Vincenzo Speziale, Director of Information Technology at Winsert. “We sought the same level of security for our virtual environment that we had with our physical network.”

Mr. Speziale was increasingly concerned about the risks of virtual networks, which range from security policy violations such as mixing trusted and un-trusted systems to malware exploits that can propagate undetected within a virtual network. A large amount of data center network traffic was moving between VMs and Winsert had no visibility or control over the communication on the virtual network.

Winsert’s traditional network security tools could not monitor, analyze or troubleshoot inter-VM traffic because communications between VMs on the same physical host never touch the traditional network. VMs were able to communicate with each other without observation or policy-based inspection and filtering, which left them highly vulnerable to malicious exploits. Additionally, worms and viruses could further spread among physical hosts via unintentional VMotion of an infected VM.

“We had a tight timeframe to put our security policies in place and needed an aggressive approach so we chose Altor’s virtual firewall,” said Mr. Speziale. “The Altor VF provides us with the visibility, administrative efficiency and VMotion security that we need today.”

The Altor VF quickly secured all of the VMs by automatically connecting to VMware’s VirtualCenter and importing the full inventory of VMs. Immediately the dashboard showed live statistics on each VM’s resource utilization along with its network activity.

The first purpose-built virtual firewall, Altor VF monitors and controls inter-VM traffic and enforces security policies at the individual VM level. Designed from scratch to secure the latest virtualization technologies, the Altor VF provides the thorough protection and ease of operation missing from traditional network security products. The Altor VF virtual firewall was specifically created to mitigate the risks of virtual networks, while maintaining the ROI of virtualization.