Catbird V-Security TrustZones™
Seasoned security experts have long known that best-practices for security and compliance in any data center mandate a network topology with trust zones.
Catbird TrustZones™ brings traditional physical network segmentation to the virtual infrastructure, without the overhead of firewall latency and performance degradation. Catbird TrustZones™ delivers:
- Improved consolidation, by allowing VMs of varying trust-levels to share a common host
- Rapid P2V of established network segmentation
- Inter-VM traffic control within a policy-based framework
- VMware Sprawl Control
TrustZones™ Keep You Compliant
We all know that good network segmentation is just good housekeeping, critical to good security and compliance. Catbird V-Security™ takes compliance even further by delivering
- Secondary validation on VMware system administrator activity
- Control of VM activity, including automatic quarantine of unauthorized VMs
- Enforcement of network security policies critical to HIPPA, SOX, GLBA and FISMA
TrustZones, not Firewalls
TrustZones™ avoids the performance and latency penalties of firewalls. Through the use of virtual infrastructure APIs and the Catbird V-Agent™ -a passive network agent on the virtual switch - Catbird V-Security avoids in-line inspection, thereby providing a more scalable and manageable solution for network segmentation. TrustZones™ utilizes user-defined asset groups and policy-based security templates to manage the Zones, with no logical limits to the number of Zones within a virtual switch.
Firewalls are old-think
Most of us are familiar with the tried-and-true concepts used in physical network segmentation: firewalls, routers, VLANs and other network access control devices. It’s natural to look for the same old Access Control Lists (ACLs) and firewall rules to control intercommunication on the virtual network, basing them on authorization rules defined in some security architecture. But this is an expensive approach in the virtual infrastructure; a different model is needed to minimize performance and latency. Indeed, even greater functionality can be derived through integration with the virtual switch, virtual infrastructure APIs, and other network-security technologies.
Why Firewalls Are Expensive
Firewalls are, by definition, in-line devices. In-line devices make little sense in a virtual network because they impose performance and latency penalties, reducing scalability and ROI. A firewall on the virtual infrastructure requires that all traffic emanating from each VM be inspected by the firewall before the traffic reaches the virtual switch. While this in-line inspection makes sense on physical networks where work is off-loaded to inexpensive dedicated hardware, in-line inspection on the virtual infrastructure is costly because it impacts the same pool of processor and memory and degrades some of the very best reasons to virtualize in the first place.
Catbird’s pioneering approach to virtualization security, including TrustZones, gives our customers confidence that their virtual infrastructure is even more secure than their physical one.
Learn More About
Catbird's Virtual Security Assesment
Catbird Policy and Compliance Monitoring
Resources
Request a Free Trial and Evaluator’s Guide
Request Catbird’s V-Agent White Paper
Download the Catbird V-Security™ Datasheet
Download the Catbird V-Agent™ V-Agent Case Study.
Analyst's Report
See what the 451 Group has to say about the Catbird V-Agent™1800 Green Hills Road, Suite 113
Scotts Valley, CA 95066
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