Juniper Extends Virtualization Defense Platform with Antivirus Protections

Rapid adoption of server virtualization is forcing companies to think about the security implications of that strategy. As recently as five years ago, most companies employed server virtualization sparsely, mostly in test and development environments and limited “pilot” deployments. Today, however, organizations are increasingly relying on virtual servers for critical applications.

“To date, much of the focus of virtualization has been on the operational, organization and economic benefits the technology offer companies. As virtualization has gained acceptance in corporate data centers, however, security has gone from an afterthought to a serious concern. For virtualization to deliver its benefits as securely as possible, companies need to implement a layered defense specific to the virtualized environment,” said Jeff Berryhill, Sales Director, Milestone Systems.

Milestone recommends the Juniper Networks solution for customers looking for a comprehensive virtualization security platform. The new functionalities of its vGW Virtual Gateway provide virtualization-specific antivirus protections and continuous monitoring against malware and hackers, while simultaneously ensuring that security does not impede virtualized workload performance or present a barrier to implementing large-scale virtualized environments.

Added to vGW Virtual Gateway version 5.0 are increased protection, scalability and compliance features for virtualized workloads. vGW 5.0 integrates monitoring, firewall, intrusion detection and compliance capabilities with new layers of defenses including antivirus protection, hypervisor compliance monitoring and large-scale virtualization security management capabilities, making it a universal threat management solution for cloud computing.

“Juniper provides an innovative solution to integrate physical and virtual network security at scale with vGW Virtual Gateway and the SRX series,” said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “With vGW Virtual Gateway 5.0, Juniper provides a tightly integrated virtual solution for defense-in-depth protection and centralized security management.”

The vGW 5.0 antivirus feature secures VMs against resident malware and other programs designed to hide in files and VMs in order to disrupt business or rob organizations of mission-critical information. The vGW 5.0 AV protections can detect the malware or viruses and quarantine the infected files or infected guest VMs themselves.

The vGW 5.0 antivirus engine provides optional on-demand scanning so that administrators can scan VMs offline at optimal off peak times when network resource use is low. The vGW 5.0 virtualization-specific approach to AV offers numerous scanning options, allowing organizations to cost-effectively optimize their antivirus protections for performance and intelligent scanning. The net effect is optimal VM host performance even when what is traditionally CPU and RAM-intensive AV security is turned on.

Additional vGW Virtual Gateway 5.0 enhancements include:

• VM gold image enforcement that provides a sophisticated compliance-checking mechanism and continuous monitoring of the desired security state with alerting and mitigation options for instances when that state is negatively impacted;
  
• Multi-center/management support that synthesizes security policies for large-scale deployments into a single manageable whole across geographies and data center locations;
  
• Split-center management capabilities that segment information contained in one VMware vCenter Server instance into multiple, independently managed vGW to improve resource isolation for cloud services or multi-tenancy;

• Tree search features within Smart Group expression builder and the ability to easily quarantine VMs that become non-compliant, supporting quick and easy search, classification and mitigation across a large number of tenants.

“Businesses have a lot to gain from optimizing their data center operations through virtualization, and security concerns should not impede those potentially huge cost savings,” said Douglas Murray, senior vice president and general manager, security business unit at Juniper Networks. “The latest version of our vGW Series not only enhances security protections without compromising capacity, but enables scalable management across global virtualized environments with multiple data centers.”

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