At the RSA Conference 2008,  Montego Networks™, an innovative provider of policy enforcement, access control and secure switching for virtual networks, today announced its HyperVSecurity™ Alliance, an initiative allowing third-party vendors to integrate their products with Montego’s HyperVSecurity™ technology platform. Through their integration with Montego’s architecture, technology partners and their customers will be able to leverage the power, efficiency and operational benefits of the Montego HyperSwitch™—the industry’s first virtual security switch.

The Montego HyperVSecurity vendor-agnostic framework facilitates an interoperable virtual security architecture enabling VM-to-VM visibility, inspection and security, and delivers valuable solutions with minimal network configuration, reliability and performance headaches. For virtualization customers, the HyperVSecurity™ Alliance provides a flexible, integrated toolkit they can confidently deploy to address needs for virtual security, application performance and investment protection. Through its Alliance, Montego Networks is well positioned to build productive partnerships with vendors of best-of-breed IDS/IPS, patch management, behavioral analysis, anti-malware, network monitoring, and other applications.

The HyperVSecurity™ Alliance lets its partners rapidly leverage advantages of the Montego platform including fast access to virtual market applications, co-branded lead-generation channel presence & sales.  Concurrently, it gives virtualization channel partners a ready-made portfolio of certified products, customer-ready solutions and cross-sell revenue opportunities. 

Charter Members of the HyperVSecurity Alliance include these networking and security solutions innovators:

·   Cyberoam: Unified Threat Management Plus (UTM+)

·   Lancope: StealthWatch™ for NetFlow and sFlow-based Anomaly Detection and Network Performance Monitoring

·   Plixer International: Scrutinizer™ NetFlow Analyzer

·   StillSecure® — Commercial and open source secure network infrastructure solutions including NAC, IDS/IPS,
vulnerability management and a unified networking/security platform

Support for the Alliance from its members:

“Many of our customers and channel partners are excited about virtualization, so it’s imperative that we can provide them with a robust network security strategy that best meets the needs of any data center environment,” said Joshua Block, VP/North American Operations, Cyberoam. “Through the HyperVSecurity Alliance and Montego’s policy-based switching technology, Cyberoam is now able to inspect specific traffic of interest for viruses and malware between Virtual Machines. And with the Alliance’s marketing support, we’re able to provide our own channel partners with resources they need to successfully meet their business & sales objectives.”

“Lancope is proud to be a Charter Member of Montego's HyperVSecurity Alliance. By integrating StealthWatch with the Montego HyperSwitch, we are enabling enterprises to confidently monitor and secure VM-to-VM NetFlow traffic communications,” said Adam Powers, CTO of Lancope, provider of StealthWatch, the most widely used Network Behavior Analysis solution. "StealthWatch provides critical visibility into all VM-to-VM network communications resulting in both an optimized and secure end-user experience on the network.”

“Using NetFlow, Montego’s HyperSwitch gives customers more insight into server traffic from each virtual machine.  Because of this, Scrutinizer NetFlow Analyzer can now provide perceptive network details in a virtualized environment,” said Mike Patterson, CEO of Plixer International.

“Virtualization provides many benefits to the data center including minimizing costs, rack space, as well as the time and effort it takes to deploy new hardware and applications,” said Alan Shimel, Chief Strategy Officer at StillSecure. “Through our partnership with Montego Networks, StillSecure has the ability to work within the hypervisor to provide IDS/IPS, vulnerability management, and NAC in virtual-to-virtual environments. We look forward to working with companies like Montego who understand the importance of virtualization and can help us bring security to the virtual world.”

The Montego HyperSwitch approaches virtualized network security from a new direction that integrates network policy enforcement and access control with a high-availability virtual security switch.  This unique approach allows the Montego HyperSwitch to efficiently deliver advanced capabilities including policy-based virtual network partitioning, L2-L4 Firewall, Identity Firewall, Content Firewall, Virtual Network Discovery, Secure Inter-VM communication, 802.1Q VLANs, 802.1D Spanning Tree, Load-balanced Quality of Service (QoS), Policy-Based Switching, Policy-Based Traffic Mirroring, NetFlow, and more.  The HyperSwitch also includes Montego Firewall Control Protocol (MFCP) which enables 3rd party security vendors to leverage API calls that allow for remote configuration of its security policies.

“Dynamic virtual environments and rapidly changing threats make it impossible for one vendor to solve every potential security challenge.  As proven in the past, an open, interoperable framework is the best way to meet evolving requirements for security and performance.  We’re proud to introduce the HyperVSecurity Alliance as way for multiple security solutions to co-exist within the virtual environment,” said John Peterson, CTO and co-founder of Montego Networks. “Through our support for user-defined policy controls that dictate which packets get inspected by particular security applications, along with APIs that allow approved vendors to invoke Firewall policy, Montego allows a multitude of security solutions to operate simultaneously without major performance impact.”