AlgoSec Brings Virtual Firewall Management Inside the Hypervisor

Managing firewalls is tough enough these days, but managing firewalls you can’t see can be next to impossible.

As firewall technology has evolved in tandem with virtualization, more and more virtual firewalls are being deployed to separate different application workloads running on the same virtual machine. But with the addition of each virtual machine IT is increasingly finding itself having to manually manage and configure a virtual firewall.

To address this issue AlgoSec announced it is extending its suite of firewall management software to add support for firewalls inside a hypervisor. The first instance of that hypervisor-based firewall support comes in the form of the virtual edition of the Check Point Security Gateway from Check Point Software.

AlgoSec CTO Avishai Wool notes many IT organizations will face the challenge of managing all the different forms of firewall technologies being deployed by any number of vendors. In addition to traditional firewalls and next-generation firewalls, that same technology is being deployed inside hypervisors and as virtual appliances that sit on top of the virtual machine. What IT organizations will need, he says, is a holistic approach to managing all those instances of firewalls that not only reduces the number to tools required but also consistently automates the management of rules across all those firewalls.

There is no doubt the growing complexity of the overall IT environment coupled with the growing volume and sophistication of IT threats ultimately will require IT organizations to rely more of IT automation tools for both systems and security management. IT organizations now must figure out how to change their internal processes to accommodate the fact that such tools now increasingly exist.