Stonesoft announced it has become a member of the Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program of VMware. With its StoneGate Firewall/VPN and IPS technologies, Stonesoft has competence and expertise in securing virtual, as well as physical network environments.

The VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program will provide Stonesoft the technical and marketing resources needed to test, support and market StoneGate products to companies looking to secure their virtual network environments.

With their software-based design and production-proven technology, StoneGate solutions has the ability to adapt to virtual environments. Stonesoft has already used the platform internally for several years and is now offering it for customer use as well. Stonesoft also has several years of experience providing security solutions for virtual servers and networks running in an IBM System z environment.

"When companies put virtual servers into production, they typically start out using the same methods to secure virtual servers as physical ones," said John Burke, Principal Research Analyst with Nemertes Research. "Among participants in our data center security research, segmentation is a major strategy and 67 percent used VLANs, firewalls, and intrusion prevention devices between servers to segment data center networks. Unfortunately, in virtual environments segmentation becomes increasingly difficult as it directly reduces the agility and flexibility that provides the strongest impetus for virtualization. To avoid having security policies undermine larger data center and business strategies, security architects need to carefully select products that are supportive of virtualized infrastructures."

“Virtualization technology has matured rapidly and is currently one of the leading trends among enterprises and organizations. Regarding the business benefits brought by virtualization, we strongly believe this development will continue to expand,” said Outi Torniainen, Vice President of Marketing at Stonesoft.

“As a provider of integrated network security and resilient connectivity, Stonesoft understands the security challenges of virtualized networks. With our background and experience, we can offer network security solutions that allow organizations to get the full benefits from virtualization – securely.”

“We strongly believe in the impact of virtualization and are pleased to become a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program. We are proud to offer our customers the possibility to test and use StoneGate products in VMware virtual environments and help them to further improve sustainability and even lower cost of ownership (TCO) further than before,” said Torniainen.

“The strength of the StoneGate solutions lies in capability, agility and flexibility, which make the solutions ideal for use in virtual environments,” highlighted Torniainen. “Whereas using hardware-based firewalls in virtual environments often requires considerable efforts or is not possible at all, Stonesoft’s software-based solutions have once again proven their excellence. Moreover, Stonesoft is one of the few vendors that can provide a solution for the virtual as well as the physical environments that provides centralized management and consistent security policies.”

Key benefits of virtualization
While virtualization concentrates more users and applications on fewer, more complex, shared virtual environments, organizations benefit from significant reductions in their need for server room space and energy consumption. In addition to cost savings, this helps them to reduce environmental impact. Other benefits include enhanced manageability and flexibility. New machines can be easily created and redundant ones destroyed.

Virtualization is attractive for large organizations and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with several customers, firewall clusters and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) appliances. Instead of having to set up environments with dozens of servers, MSPs can now manage all of these systems with just one computer. In addition, unlike most virtual-network security products, which are built on the vendors’ own hardware, StoneGate solutions are suitable for consolidation projects as they can be installed at any location in the virtual network.

In the common scenario where organizations have consolidated servers in virtual environments, the traffic between servers is protected by StoneGate Firewall/VPN and IPS solutions.