Virtualization Integration

Moving Security at the Speed of Virtualization

Many enterprises today rely heavily on virtualization to reduce operating costs stemming from increasing number of physical servers. Virtual servers, which replaced physical servers, running app servers, web servers and database servers are now the norm and tools are readily available that can easily provision new virtual resources in seconds to support the ever-growing computing demands.

Before NetCitadel’s OneControl, the growing number of virtual servers would have required multiple lines of configuration changes to firewalls policies and numerous change requests that involved complicated IT coordination. Network security provisioning times are in the order of multiple weeks, and higher than VM provisioning SLAs, which is less than 24 hours. IT initiatives, such as IT-as-a-Service, are greatly impacted and businesses are stalled from completing workloads that affects revenue.

With the OneControl Virtual Security Module, additions or deletions of virtual servers are monitored and appropriate network security policy configurations are made in real-time. Monitoring of changes in virtual environments is performed using various methods that include polling and event-based monitoring. Notification of configuration changes to network security devices are made and logged for audit purposes. More importantly, virtualization integration:

 

• Reduces multiple weeks of network security provisioning times to minutes.
• Provides computing resources that can now dynamically adapt to meet ongoing business demands.
• Delivers greater elasticity of computing resources that easily scales up or down, depending on needs.
• Automation removes administrative overhead, including errors caused by manual changes.
• Secure virtual servers that do not affect time-to-market, and are done network-wide in real-time.
• Use of rapid and automated security deployments mitigate business risks, and increases compliance.