CloudPassage Unveils Security Products Built for Elastic Cloud Environments
Halo SVM and Slo Firewall products help cloud-based enterprises automate vulnerability management and server firewalls in the cloud
Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor's statements.
CloudPassage today introduced the Halo SVM (Server Vulnerability Management) and Halo Firewall products, server security and compliance products purpose-built for elastic cloud environments. They deliver server exposure assessment, configuration compliance monitoring, and network access control -- automating the three most fundamental practices for securing servers in public and hybrid clouds.
A top impediment to public cloud adoption is security. Halo SVM addresses server vulnerability management needs with the scalability, speed, and elasticity needed for cloud server environments. Built on the Halo architecture, the Halo SVM product delivers completely accurate server exposure assessment with little impact to customers’ server resources. Halo SVM functions quickly and efficiently -- thousands of server configuration points are assessed in seconds -- enabling customers to maintain continuous exposure and compliance intelligence, even in rapidly growing cloud server farms.
The Halo Firewall product controls server attack surfaces by centralizing and automating host-based firewall management, the preferred alternative to traditional enterprise perimeter firewalls. The product provides customers with unified cloud-wide firewall policy management from a graphical Web front-end, eliminating the untenable operational overhead and likely errors associated with manual host-based firewall management.
Halo Firewall automatically updates individual host-based firewall configurations whenever cloud servers are added or removed -- including server cloning or cloudbursting operations -- with no intervention by system administrators. The product also transparently tackles dynamic public-cloud IP addressing, cited by IaaS providers as a complication in cloud server firewall management. Halo Firewall enables customers to ensure strong, flexible network access control with the ease of management that parallels traditional enterprise firewalls.
Server security fundamentals are critical in cloud environments, especially public cloud servers that must operate without the benefits of traditional enterprise perimeter protection. Recent studies by Verizon Business and the U.S. Secret Service indicate that 95 percent of compromises leading to information and identity theft could have been prevented by basic security configuration, software patching and network access control, basic steps recommended by IaaS providers.
The Halo architecture unlocks the capabilities of the first two CloudPassage products. This architecture provides high levels of server security automation for multiple security functions while transparently handling the problems associated with securing highly fluid, agile, and scalable cloud server hosting environments. Secure, ultra-lightweight Halo Daemons are backed by the elastic compute power of the Halo Grid, eliminating resource utilization on protected servers and delivering scalability and elasticity that can keep up with cloud-hosted server farms.
CloudPassage offers a free version of Halo SVM and Halo Firewall products allowing customers to secure an unlimited number of cloud servers. Emerging products and advanced features will be offered as paid upgrades to extend customer capabilities as their cloud infrastructures grow. Both products can be downloaded from the CloudPassage site at http://www.cloudpassage.com.