Cyber security solutions from established vendors can’t secure a virtualized data center because their code was written for physical infrastructure, says Tim Eades, CEO of vArmour.

The US start-up develops what it calls a ‘post-cloud, post-virtualization’ data center security solution that’s all software, capable of monitoring traffic inside VMs and between them.

We met Eades at IP Expo in London, where he was showing the product a week after the company officially launched in the EMEA region.

Distributed physically, united logically
vArmor came out of ‘stealth mode’ in the US in September, after three years of intensive R&D. The company was founded by some of the engineers who developed NetScreen, the original performance firewall now owned by Juniper Networks. But while NetScreen was based on specialized ASIC chips, vArmour secures networks through software alone.

Eades told DatacenterDynamics that with the wider adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, the traffic in the data centers flows ‘east-west’ (between servers) more than it does ‘north-south’ (in and out of the data center). That’s why security professionals need tools to catch cyber criminals as they move through the network, rather than try and stop them at the perimeter – something that’s becoming increasingly difficult thanks to trends like BYOD.

“What we did is we created a distributed security system for the data center that can look at traffic east-west,” explained Eades. “Imagine having line cards in software, which you can place anywhere you want – next to the hypervisor, between hypervisors, end of the road, top of the rack – thousands of them. They connect via Layer 2 VXLAN. It’s just one firewall, but physically it’s distributed.”

vArmour software doesn’t care about network topology or orchestration, and is fully compatible with OpenStack. Meanwhile, the built-in analytics capability helps network administrators make the right decisions.

“You see something bad happening in the network, but you need to understand it before you stop it. Otherwise, you might shut the gate and the bad guy could be on this side or that side, you don’t know.”

Eades says the incumbent security vendors like Juniper, McAfee and Cisco are struggling [Symantec just announced it is going to split into two companies] because they are reluctant to completely rewrite their software products for virtualized and cloud environments.

“It’s not about doing it incrementally better; you have to secure it differently. The old companies with old architectures are essentially hardware companies. They can’t transform because they have a business rhythm and business motion that’s in the way.”

He added that it was a “really amazing time to be in security” for a smaller, more agile company.

vArmour has just signed a deal with Big Technology, a division of Exclusive Networks Group, making it the exclusive distributor of its data center security software across EMEA.