‘Data Defined Perimeter’ solution protects critical assets wherever they reside by giving enterprises and service providers visibility, control and threat defences for the agile data centre

LONDON, UK AND MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif – Oct 2, 2014 - Recently surfaced from stealth mode with the world’s first post-cloud, post-virtualisation data centre security solution, vArmour is today formally launching in the EMEA market and will demo its solution at the upcoming IP EXPO event in London on 8th-9th October. With a dedicated focus on protecting global enterprises’ most valuable asset – their data – vArmour brings a unique approach to data centre security. Through an exclusive distribution partnership with Big Technology, a division of Exclusive Networks Group, vArmour offers the UK and pan-EMEA market the only solution that visualises the enterprises’ entire set of data, no matter where it comes from or how it changes.

In a recent Gartner report, ‘Big Data Needs a Data-Centric Security Focus’, the research company identifies a glaring security issue: “Big data initiatives require data to move between structured and unstructured data silos, exposing incoherent data security policies that CISOs must address to avoid security chaos. CISOs must address big data initiatives that will expose uncoordinated data security policies, operations and management responsibilities of security, and database and identity management teams.” [1]

vArmour’s solution is engineered from the ground up for big data and the cloud to protect against this security chaos. Existing security solutions and legacy technologies fail to effectively combat cyber criminals because they focus on protecting traditional location-based perimeters which increases the risk of attacks on low profile assets. 83% of traffic now flows ‘east/west’ within the data centre and is never seen by the traditional perimeter, allowing attackers to move undetected and laterally across the data centre to critical enterprise assets.

“Data centre consolidation and horizontal scalability (Web Scale), has paved the way for massive increases in data centre scale and complexity, and as a result a monumental increase in network traffic - especially machine to machine traffic within the data centre itself,” said Sean Remnant, group chief technology officer, Exclusive Networks. “This growth in east/west traffic creates new risks and attack surfaces that need to be monitored and protected, and as a result there is a growing mismatch between data centre advances and existing cyber security strategies. The problem here is you can’t fight new wars with old weapons.”

By defending this ‘Data Defined Perimeter’, vArmour’s solution is unique as it allows customers to understand an attack’s progression across the data centre. It can identify both the extent of the compromise as well as the ‘Patient Zero’ – the attacker’s point of origin into the network. The solution provides distributed sensors and enforcement points in a single logical system that scales horizontally, delivering superior security with simple operations.

“Security and virtualisation are rapidly converging and the digital war in this battleground will not be won by the enterprise if security solutions are not built with this in mind,” said Tim Eades, vArmour CEO. “We bring a different approach to data centre security, with our existing customers are seeing value in our solution in as little as 30 seconds after deployment. We see huge opportunities in EMEA for us to deliver similar results and gain accelerated market traction.”

vArmour’s data centre security solution, deployed into enterprises and service partners since early 2014, delivers a converged set of forensic and enforcement capabilities including:

Security Visibility – Complete visibility into every application, asset, packet and connection in the data centre.
Threat Analytics – Complex threat analytics as delivered through real-time detection and visualisation of laterally moving threats.
Attack Remediation – Business-process-aware remediation policies to contain compromised hosts and prevent exfiltration.
Policy Control and Enforcement – Micro-segmentation and policy enforcement to isolate and control communications between applications, workgroups and tenants.
“Enterprises are fast evolving from physical and hybrid to full virtual environments, but security solutions have been struggling to adapt to this alongside managing how to bridge the growing mis-match between legacy gateway perimeter devices and the agile infrastructures being deployed today,” said Jason Dance, managing director of Big Technology UK. “vArmour changes all that at a stroke; we offer our partners something different and valuable; vArmour is the simplest and most effective way to secure enterprise data from the advanced threats and cyber attacks it faces.”

vArmour takes a software-first approach to enterprise security as cyber criminals become ever more agile and intelligent. The ubiquity of the cloud combined with increasing automation and virtualisation means that enterprises’ applications, databases and storage systems can be hosted anywhere, making traditional perimeter-based security protocols obsolete.

“We are looking for effective bridges between public and private clouds that enable consistency and efficiency for our customers, particularly in regards to security,” commented Sean Catlin, chief technology officer at Canopy. “The vArmour security fabric enables this transparently. With vArmour we can deploy a single security solution to protect a Virtual Data Centre in any cloud from a single cloud management and control plane.”

vArmour and Big Technology will both be participating in the upcoming IP EXPO event in London on 8th-9th October. Visit Stand CC3 to meet the team and explore the technology.

[1] Big Data Needs a Data-Centric Security Focus, Analyst(s): Brian Lowans, Earl Perkins, 26 March 2014