CloudPassage today announced the immediate availability of the latest release of Halo, the only software-defined security platform purpose-built for cloud and virtualized infrastructure. The new capabilities offered in the release make it faster, easier and more effective for Global 2000 companies to detect and react to security vulnerabilities in these environments.

"CloudPassage Halo is a powerful weapon in the security arsenal of any enterprise," stated Nate Lindstrom, vice president of technology operations for OneLogin. “As business critical data and applications move into virtualized data centers and the cloud, it’s become clear that perimeter-based security models simply won’t work. CloudPassage solves these issues with a flexible, elastic software-defined security platform that delivers the abstraction, automation and orchestration required with modern infrastructure.”

For decades, IT security has been built around models that assume availability of fixed perimeters, physical hardware and close proximity of data. Cloud environments and virtualized data centers disrupt these assumptions dramatically. The dynamic, automated and abstracted nature of these environments has made it extremely difficult for businesses to detect and respond quickly to critical security vulnerabilities, as well as remain compliant with ever-increasing regulations.

"Disruptive changes are occurring in corporate IT environments as large enterprises rapidly accelerate adoption of public and private cloud solutions," said Carson Sweet, a 22-year veteran of the security industry and CEO of CloudPassage. “As a result, new security strategies and solutions are urgently needed.”

As large enterprises accelerate cloud adoption, there is a clear demand for solutions that address the dynamic security and compliance needs across private and multi-cloud environments. Gartner has identified software-defined security as a key component of the modern, software-defined data center in a report (G00262841) issued September 10, 2014.

The latest release of Halo solves these challenges and includes dozens of new features and enhancements designed to bring greater risk, compliance and security visibility. The release includes:

• Halo Audit Mode delivers greater visibility for large, global enterprises by enabling companies to monitor their virtual infrastructure without impacting system availability or performance. Halo’s lightweight agent, integrated with cloud orchestration tools, ensures that within seconds any new workload in the cloud can be assessed for vulnerabilities and made immediately accountable to security policies.

• Halo Log Based Intrusion Detection System allows immediate visibility and notification when security anomalies are detected in watched log files. Policies and enforcement can be defined for specific indicators of risk, compromise or error to enable quick security action. Organizations can also monitor network or system activities for malicious behaviors or policy violations, and automatically generate alerts and reports. This feature gives, regardless of scale, the near real-time ability to detect unauthorized accounts being created, application security errors, changes to host firewall configurations, and other events that can threaten the security and compliance of an organization.

"The benefits are so compelling that most businesses are rapidly expanding their usage of cloud infrastructure. Of course, with big change comes big disruption," said Amrit Williams, chief technology officer at CloudPassage. “Because the IT environment has been significantly disrupted, most enterprises are struggling with even basic risk and compliance visibility. CloudPassage Halo Audit Mode is designed to address this gap, providing low-friction oversight into cloud infrastructure environments.”