Altor 4.0 Will Hunt You Down Like a Dog
In the very unforgiving world of Altor Networks 4.0, if you're a rogue VM, blacklisted app, or turned-off anti-virus package, you're toast. No questions asked. No speedy trial. No time to lawyer-up. If you're lucky, you get quarantined, but don't make any long-term plans.
This is because 4.0--which almost seems like a living, breathing thing bent on some kind of demented revenge--leverages virtual machine introspection (sounds insidious, doesn't it?) to bring what Altor refers to as "X-ray like visibility" to internal VM states. The benefits of this insider access include ruthless compliance assessment, automated security enforcement meted out with the brutality of a third-world secret police force, and detailed, no-knock virtual infrastructure and VM risk-state audits. OK, end of cheesy analogies.
As Altor notes, "By leveraging introspection to collect VM attributes, such as installed applications, and coupling it with Altor's deep knowledge of the virtual network, Altor 4.0 creates a powerful database of control points by which security policies and compliance rules can be defined. Altor makes this rich data available in intuitive user interfaces (UIs) that let administrators build the entire range of policies, from corporate rules on global protocol handling to discrete regulation and compliance-driven policies for how VMs should be configured. Built-in templates help jump-start the process of building policies, while intuitive tools make quick work of customizing the rule sets."
Altor is on a bit of a roll, having won the 2010 RSA conference Innovator of the Year award, and secured $10 million in Series B funding. Now, it is leveraging its success by introducing a product they hope will push people forward from test-and-dev implementations to full-blown, datacenter virtualization that includes support for enterprise networks and cloud infrastructures--without VM sprawl.
According to Johnnie Konstantas, Altor VP of marketing, 4.0 can track newly created VMs that would otherwise get moved around and become unaccountable. It can also closely monitor VMs 24-7, enforce access control, and make changes if risk factors become unacceptable--all in accordance with corporate policies. As Konstantas puts it, "We just auto-enforce your will."
Which is a scary thing if you're an unauthorized change to a VM.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 06/17/2010 at 12:48 PM