Under a new partnership, Amazon Web Services customers have Check Point Software Technologies' virtual security appliances built into their customized cloud environments.
Check Point Software
Technologies has partnered with Amazon to bring virtual security appliances to
its Amazon Web Services.
AWS customers will be able
to manage Check Point's virtual security gateways from the centralized
management dashboard to apply security policies to the cloud infrastructure,
Check Point announced Jan. 4. Virtual Appliance for Amazon Web Services offers
customers access to more than 30 security applications, including a firewall,
virtual private network, URL filtering, application control, intrusion
prevention, mobile access, data loss prevention, antivirus and others, the
company said.
The virtual appliance looks
just like an on-premise appliance within the Check Point management dashboard,
Fred Kost, head of product marketing at Check Point, told eWEEK. Customers who are used to the dashboard and have been
trained on Check Point's security gateways will have no trouble switching to
the cloud because the security layer will remain consistent, Kost said.
The virtual appliance is
running the "same gateway code and has the same management
capabilities," such as unified logs and reporting, as the physical boxes,
said Kost.
With this partnership, Check
Point customers would be able to apply security policies to protect
applications and data stored in the public cloud on Amazon's infrastructure in
the same way it would have protected data on-premises. Amazon built into the
platform some security features that are available to everyone but rely on a
"shared-responsibility security model" to encourage customers to run
security products that fit their requirements, according to Stephen Schmidt,
chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services.
Customers bring their own
applications onto Amazon's cloud infrastructure, and can use Check Point's line
of virtual appliances to add their own layers of security on top of what is
already in place, Kost said. The customer picks and chooses between more than
30 software "blades," or security applications, in order to create
the level of security they require.
IT departments can
"enforce a consistent security policy across the organization," Kost said.
"Security gateways in
cloud environments are equally as important as they are in on-premise
locations; therefore, unifying their policies and reporting capabilities in a
centralized way is critical to ensuring both the security and compliance
mandates of enterprises worldwide," said Lawrence Pingree, research
director at Gartner.
For organizations interested
in cloud security, they often run the security tool within a single machine
instance and have to manage them all independently. Since Check Point's gateway
appliance software runs on a machine running the Check Point operating system,
the engineers worked with Amazon to tweak the installation process, according
to Kost. Amazon created a special machine image that accommodated the gateway
appliance, he said. Customers have to present to Amazon a valid Check Point
license, specifically for use in the Amazon cloud before receiving access to
the virtual appliance.
Customers simply click on
the appliance to enable the blades in the cloud environment, making it fast and
easy to deploy.
Customers pay according to
the number of software blades they need. Pricing for a Virtual Appliance for
Amazon Web Services license starts at $2,000.
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