Industry Analysts

Here’s what some of the best-known analysts covering the virtualization market say about Altor Networks and the need for virtual network solutions:

“The increasing use of virtualization, particularly in data center environments, will lead to new potential attack paths. To protect critical servers and data in virtualized environments, organizations need to extend their security processes and controls into the virtual environment, including the use of virtual firewalls and IPSs when security separation and protection are needed.” - Neil MacDonald, Gartner

“IT administrators are challenged with the differences between virtual and physical networks, and recognize that new approaches are necessary to meet the management challenges of virtual infrastructure. Altor Networks executives see the deficiencies and are ready to leverage their background developing firewall technologies, so it’s very natural to look to them to enforce security policy on virtual networks.” - Mark Bowker, Enterprise Strategy Group

“With the proliferation of virtual machines comes increased security risks, such as snooping on and spoofing of VMs in motion. This requires new diligence. Altor Networks provides deep visibility into inter-VM communications to discover out unwanted protocols, unusual traffic, and non-compliant virtual machines.” - Mike Kahn, Clipper Group

“Virtualization, as with any emerging technology, will be the target of new security threats. Many organizations mistakenly assume that their approach for securing VMs will be the same as securing any operating system (OS) and thus plan to apply their existing configuration guidelines and standards. While this is a start, simply applying the technologies and best practices for securing physical servers won’t provide sufficient protection for VMs. Several areas are often overlooked completely. Because of the rush to adopt virtualization for server consolidation efforts, many of the issues are overlooked, best practices aren’t applied, or in some cases, the tools and technologies for addressing some of the security issues with virtualization are immature or nonexistent.” - Neil MacDonald, Gartner

“Virtual-network firewall solutions need virtual machine (VM) and policy awareness, including integration into VM management tools.” - Neil MacDonald, Gartner

“Most people don’t realize security virtualization has lagged far behind virtualization of storage, networking, and servers. The lack of suitable security is actually thwarting more widespread adoption of virtualization in some cases. Ironically, traditional static security solutions are subverting some of the operational return-on-investment offered by virtualization such as live migration.” - Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Nemertes Research

“Virtualization initiatives must not be done in isolation; the potential of new vulnerabilities and compliance gaps must be addressed. Furthermore, security approaches designed at the turn-of-the-century cannot be expected to reliably identify and remediate virtualization risks.” - Michael Suby, Director of Stratecast (a Division of Frost & Sullivan)

“Monitor network traffic, even if you don’t plan on using the internal virtual network; you need to be able to ensure that network traffic that you think shouldn’t be occurring indeed is not occurring.” - Neil MacDonald, Gartner

“For example, a misconfiguration of the internal virtual network may result in a breakdown of isolation. Unless something is monitoring internal virtual-network traffic, this would not be immediately detected.” - Neil MacDonald, Gartner