Virtual solution to secure and audit VM-to-VM communications
PacketMotion released the PacketSentry Virtual Probe, which monitors and secures access to sensitive data in VMware clusters by delivering PacketSentry’s application and identity-aware solution as a guest VM that does not require administrators’ knowledge of IP addresses and with minimal resource impact.
Applications monitored include databases, fileshares, web applications and document management, among many others.
Gartner identifies the lack of visibility and controls on internal VM-to-VM communications as the top virtual security issue for organizations. Lack of visibility and control within a virtual cluster can result in unauthorized communication between VMs, mixing of trust levels within a virtual host, and failure to detect suspicious access of key information assets. This may also result in the inability to satisfy internal audits and compliance regulations, including PCI, HIPAA and SOX.
“Organizations are concerned with a lack of visibility of internal virtual networks and the security threats from unmonitored VM-to-VM communications,” said Neil MacDonald, VP and Gartner Fellow. “Organizations need visibility across physical and virtual environments without requiring different solutions for each and that bring the same level of audit and secure control to the virtual data center as exists today in the traditional physical data center.”
The PacketSentry Virtual Probe changes the security capability in the virtual environment. It delivers a low-overhead virtual appliance that:
- Implements multiple controls in a single application
- Runs as a guest VM that consumes just 3-5 percent of the host’s CPU
- Reacts to transaction patterns without the need to know specific IP addresses
- Is priced based on number of VMs monitored, independent of VMware deployment architecture
- Automates deployment of identity-based policy in the virtual data center.
The PacketSentry Virtual Probe was built as an easy-to-install and workload-efficient addition to the virtual environment. Since the Virtual Probe consumes little server CPU, memory, and I/O resources, it can be deployed ubiquitously across servers and blades in the virtual data center for complete data protection.
The PacketSentry Virtual Probe supports VMware vSphere version 4.0 and greater, ESX version 3.5 and greater, and is available now from PacketMotion’s channel partners. The Virtual Probe is priced at $4,995 for a 5 pack of monitored servers/VMs and $21,995 for a 25 pack. Support for other hypervisors will be available in a future release.