CloudPassage, a San Francisco, California-based provider of tools to help companies secure their cloud infrastructure, this week launched Halo Enterprise, an offering purpose-built to protect heterogeneous cloud infrastructure environments at scale.
The company, which emerged from stealth mode in January 2011, has extended its flagship Halo security-as-a-service security platform to support large enterprises that may have advanced security and compliance requirements.
The Enterprise edition of Halo brings enhanced deployment, management and integration support for software-defined and traditional data center infrastructure including VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack and others.
In order to use the cloud-based security service, customers must first install a lightweight agent on each server/instance, which then connects to the “Halo Grid”, a cloud-based security analytics engine that constantly evaluates thousands of cloud security and compliance data points per instance.
“By moving security analytics overhead from protected cloud instances to the elastic cloud-powered Halo Grid, Halo automates defense-in-depth with almost zero impact on protected cloud infrastructur,” the company explained.
Halo Enterprise includes new features not previously available in earlier versions of the product, some of which include:
• SAML Sign-On Integration – Enables access to the Halo Portal for administrators and users through industry-standard SAML integration.
• Integration with other security and operations tools including security information and event management (SIEM) systems, and systems management and orchestration platforms.
• Private Cloud & Datacenter Support – HTTP proxy-enabled Halo Daemons enable protection within private cloud and datacenter environments.
• Nested Policy & Administrative Domains – Consolidate management of Halo accounts for different products or teams under a unified policy and billing structure.
• Hierarchical policy and control management – Enables security organizations to centrally administer security and compliance for large numbers of applications distributed across complex, multi-cloud infrastructure environments.
“Within cloud and software-defined datacenter environments, it’s easy to forget that you’re creating, managing and cloning real systems, each with real vulnerabilities. Halo’s extensive automation addresses that problem,” Wendy Nather of 451 Research said in a statement.
“Large organizations have heterogeneous infrastructure environments, usually a dizzying mix of hardware, virtualized systems, and multiple cloud service providers. It’s also the norm in large enterprises to have thousands of systems across a complex maze of business units and subsidiaries,” said Carson Sweet, CloudPassage CEO and co-founder, who previously served as the Principal Solutions Architect at RSA’s financial industry practice.
“Legacy security tools and models were built for another time and are inflexible to the point of breaking cloud models. Halo was built to be flexible, lightweight and incredibly easy to deploy and scale, regardless of the environment,” Carson added.