Lancope announced an integration between StealthWatch and HyperSwitch. The interoperability leverages NetFlow to deliver visibility into virtual networks to detect network congestion issues, policy violations, worm outbreaks and other security-related incidents. By combining Lancope and Montego Networks' layered security capabilities, organizations can assess virtual machines responsible for disrupting network performance and quarantine offenders before causing any impact to network availability.

By coupling StealthWatch for NetFlow-based anomaly detection and network performance monitoring with the Montego HyperSwitch virtual security switch, enterprises gain insight into virtual machine to virtual machine (VM2VM) host communications. This joint solution ensures that malicious and suspicious network behaviors are discovered and flagged so that policies can be amended to block offending hosts' virtual network communications. This visibility into virtualized environments dramatically reduces time to resolution of policy violations and network incidents, while enhancing overall network stability. The integration will soon offer mitigation capabilities against offending VMs.

"Virtualized data centers are critical segments of an enterprises, which in the past have been largely untouched by the kinds of network security and traffic analysis tools often deployed widely in organizations at-large," says Phil Hochmuth an analyst with the Yankee Group. Examples of such tools include network behavior analysis, IPS/IDS and NAC. "More recently, makers of these technologies recognize this and are starting to partner and integrate, with the goal of making traffic in these virtualized environments more visible, and virtual machines more secure and controllable."

"One of the major concerns in virtualized environments is the lack of visibility of communication between virtual machines. This lack of visibility creates security, monitoring and capacity planning challenges. Through the joint offering, the Montego HyperSwitch can leverage Lancope's NetFlow analytics tools to give network operators a new level of visibility, enabling them to see who is talking to whom, when are they communicating, how much traffic is being consumed by which applications, and by which virtual machines," said John Peterson, CTO and co-founder of Montego Networks.

Harland LaVigne, president and CEO of Lancope, added, "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. By partnering with Montego and extending their innovative approach, which readily aligns with our NetFlow expertise, Lancope gives enterprises complete visibility into, and control of, virtualized environments -- resulting in both an optimized and secure end-user experience on the network."