There have been quite a few new products announced in the last few months. Some I have received as briefings, others I have researched. These  security and data protection products show the changing face of virtualization and cloud.

Security Products

There have been some shifts in products within the virtual and cloud environments as organizations attempt to become part of the software-defined network (SDN) movement. Who will win in the end is unknown, but there have been some pretty interesting changes in the market with respect to security.

  • Brocade has purchased Vyatta. The combinations of SDN solutions could be powerful moving forward.
  • Palo Alto Networks has extended their hardware solution into the virtual environment with their VM Series virtual appliance which is designed to work within vSphere. While not an introspective approach, Palo Alto Networks now has a next gen firewall within the virtual environment.
  • Cydetic is not new per say, but does has an impressive approach to handling data assets. In effect they merge user access management of next gen firewalls with behavioral analysis to allow or disallow access to a data asset. Their behavioral components seem rather simple on the outset, but as you dig deeper, there is quite a bit more they could do here.
  • Voltage Security announced some new partner ships and capabilities. Voltage security is all about protecting the data as it enters the cloud by integrating format preserving encryption (FFX-AES) with standard encryption mechanisms depending on the data.  Their key ability is to encrypt on capture of the data with a technique that works on smart devices as well as in a gateway mode.

Getting data into the cloud securely while providing easier ways to create and secure virtual networks (whether based on physical hardware or virtual hardware) is a growing component of the industry. The main issues with movement to the cloud in nearly every survey I have seen is security and compliance, more importantly visibility within the cloud providers of what is happening to the data entrusted by tenants.

Data Protection Products

There has been quite a bit of movement in the replication receiver cloud space and it seems to be heating up even more as more companies come on board.

  • Quantum Q-Cloud has integration with Symantec OST and allows BackupExec and NetBackup customers to use Q-Cloud as a replication receiver cloud.
  • Zerto has continued to add more clouds to an already impressive list of cloud providers who support their form of replication receiver clouds.
  • Idera has entered the virtualization and cloud backup market with their agent based capability that makes use of the r1soft backup engine. They are concentrating on application awareness.

Application awareness seems to be the order of the day when it comes to backups and replication software and this is nothing new in the industry but a logic progression towards the cloud where our workloads have changed from virtual machines containers through virtual application containers where we are today talking about applications that span multiple virtual machines and perhaps even sites in the cloud and/or the organizational data center.

Conclusion

When taking singly, these announcements are largely natural progressions for the vendor products, but when we look at the big picture we see intersections which lead to real solutions. Solutions that benefit the tenants of a cloud as well as the ones managing virtual environments. We now have tools to:

  • Replicate our data anywhere
  • Securely enter data into the cloud
  • Develop  Application + Data Centric policies that span sites
  • Know which users are accessing what data, where, when, and how

All important aspects of  security and compliance policies.