Need a firewall for that virtual machine?

March 31st, 2008

By Martin Hack del.icio.us Digg this

Blue Lane

It’s actually way more than just a firewall. Blue Lane, which we’ve covered in the past here and here, calls it a virtualized IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). They are about to release extensive additions to their VM protection suite VirtualShield including integration with VMware’s VirtualCenter. By now most data centers have extensive host and network based protection, there’s certainly no shortage of available solutions. But what about those virtual servers and virtual machines that are popping up all over the network? Track down and secure each one of them by hand? - I think not.

Blue Lane
VM Infrastructure navigation tree

It looks like people are finally waking up to the looming threats of unmanaged, and even worse, often completely unprotected virtual machines. Blue Lane’s list of customer deployments is impressive and growing rapidly. As we mentioned earlier, being able to create VM’s on the fly is a great relief and adds super convenience. It also adds an extra level or risk and complexity for the security guys.

Blue Lane’s solution allows administrators to secure VM’s for their entire data center, cluster, host or single VM. Within the next couple of months Blue Lane is going to add the following features to VirtualShield (see screenshots below):

  • Flow analytics Visibility into network flows by datacenter, cluster, host, VM
  • VMwall™ App-aware firewall - Allow/deny services for a given port within the datacenter / cluster / host; e.g., allow windows for the cluster, deny the rest
  • Application control policy - Rich set of application-specific inbound/outbound policies; e.g., deny user_x access to a certain set of operations on a given database, deny outbound rsh/rexec, etc. (intra-flow policy)
  • Protocol integrity check - Validate that a given protocol/service runs on the given port
  • Vulnerability policy framework - Allows customers to proactively configure the system to handle attacks such as SQLi, XSS, http smuggling, etc.

    Especially the VMwall Firewall in combination with Flow analytics should be a very strong tool to provide enterprise wide security and basic analysis for virtual environments.

    Blue Lane
    Flow Control for VM infrastructure - 30 Day Time Period




    Blue Lane
    Application Vulnerability Protection Screen




    Blue Lane
    VirtualShield Policies


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    1 Comment(s)

    1. Comment by Mhunter on March 5, 2010 1:32 am

      I have zero interest in Blue Lane other than the fact that I dig their technology and products and think it solves some serious business problems elegantly and efficiently with a security efficacy that is worth its weight in gold.

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