Stonesoft Guards Against External And Intrahost Threats

Posted by Joe Hernick
February 28, 2008

I spoke with Stonesoft on Wednesday regarding the company's new security solutions for VMware. Intrahost protection, anyone? Stonesoft, a Finnish network security shop founded in '90, has been working with virtualization issues since 2002 when it released a firewall product for IBM mainframe environments. It has built a solid customer base on high availability, clustered security solutions, and multilink routers.

Yesterday at Cannes the company announced it had joined the VMware Technology Alliance Program.

Of more direct interest to all of us ... Stonesoft also announced the availability of its StoneGate Firewall/VPN and intrusion protection systems for VMware.

StoneGate has been protecting physical networks, x86 servers, and Big Iron for a while now. With this release the company is extending its security reach into virtualized space with intrahost-capable firewall and IPS offerings.

This is very cool stuff; one management console and rule set can be applied across an enterprise, including monitoring activity between VMs inside an ESX host. StoneGate offers inspection of IP traffic on internal, virtualized networks, with support for VMotioning and other VM hijinks thanks to a flexible "define object alias" firewall setting that allows rule sets to be tied to named servers as well as static addresses.

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