Today 5nine Software announced the Release of 5nine Security Manager for Hyper-V - agentless Anti-Virus (AV), Anti-Malware and Virtual Firewall for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

The critical need for security and compliance solutions designed specifically for private and public clouds is increasing due to the rapidly growing amount of vulnerabilities, malware, and hacker techniques; some of the malware specifically targeting virtual infrastructures.

5nine Security Manager for Hyper-V is a complete agentless security solution built specifically for the Microsoft virtualization platform and fully takes advantage of the extensibility of the new Windows Server Hyper-V Virtual Switch.

It controls network traffic between virtual machines, detects and blocks malicious attacks, performs fast anti-virus scans and thus improves the security of a virtualized environment.

5nine Security Manager combines multiple protection modules, including Anti-Malware, Programmatic Virtual Firewall, log inspection and IDS/Web application protection, in a single and centrally managed software solution.

This solution became possible with the new Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) interfaces, the new architecture of the Windows Server Hyper-V Extensible Switch, as well as Microsoft’s new powerful APIs. The new 5nine Security Manager now consists of the User Mode service, which implements and installs the WFP provider on the host machine, and the Kernel Mode driver, which implements Hyper-V Extensible Switch WFP-callout filtering.

Deployment, network policies management and support of multiple guest operating systems (Windows, Linux, BSD and others) is now extremely simple to deploy and manage. The elegance of the 5nine Hyper-V Security Solution delivers superior functionality along with immediate and sustained ROI.

5nine Security Manager, which is designed for anti-virus and virtual network protection of both Windows Server Hyper-V SMB and large private cloud deployments. It comes in three editions for the corresponding versions of Windows Server 2012: Essentials, Standard and Data Center.

Main Features and Benefits:

• Developed and Optimized for virtualized environments – Expertly isolates and safeguards VMs for maximum security; unlike traditional security products 5nine Security Manager's agentless approach can detect infected virtual machines and hosts without excessive performance overhead, which can cause 'antivirus storms' and other types of workload bottlenecks
• Fast and effective anti-malware scans of both VMs and hosts, using unique technologies
• Secure multi-tenant firewalling, interoperating with Hyper-V Network Virtualization

"Unlike traditional firewalls, the new 5nine Security Manager with Anti-Virus and Virtual Firewall for Windows Server Hyper-V allows customers to programmatically manage network security on both a 'per-VM' and 'per-Host' basis,"- said Dr. Konstantin Malkov, CTO of 5nine Software, - "We are pleased to report that 5nine Security Manager with Anti-Virus is the first agentless anti-malware and virtual firewall solution for the Windows Server Hyper-V. The new 5nine Agentless Anti-Malware is fast, effective, and allows users to avoid anti-virus storms. This definitely decreases management costs and adds to the security of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V environments."

5nine Security Manager uses Sophos Anti-Virus Enterprise engine, which now does not require in - guest scanning with the new 5nine Security Manager Agentless architecture.

"Scalability and thus ROI of virtualization projects have been restricted by the intensity of security applications. Traditional anti-virus solutions were designed for a one to one relationship with the hardware, so customers had to run an instance of the security agent in each guest. All of these instances quickly add up to significant performance issues, with painful cost implications. In the new 5nine Security Manager, Sophos Anti-Virus can perform expensive security tasks centrally on the host, significantly enhancing performance while maintaining protection," - said James Lyne, Director of Technology Strategy, Sophos.

5nine Security Manager 3.0 continues to support 5nine Virtual Firewall PowerShell APIs and has a management application GUI similar to the popular 5nine Virtual Firewall and Anti-Virus version 2.2

"More and more companies, including those in the highly regulated financial, insurance and healthcare industries, are looking to the proven value of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization to reduce costs, optimize IT resources, and create a foundation for cloud computing,"- said Bob Combs Senior Program Manager, Windows Networking, Microsoft, - "5nine Security Manager with Anti-Malware and Virtual Firewall is designed to help our mutual customers address the important security and compliance considerations, including secure network virtualization, that are part of every cloud deployment. We are pleased to work with 5nine Software in enabling software-defined networks with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1."

Pricing and Availability

5nine is priced either per-server, or per-processor, depending on selected edition. Per-VM and monthly subscription plans are also available.

Please contact 5nine at 5nine Security Manager for Hyper-V or info@5nine.com for the pricing.