Security management specialist AlgoSec announced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), a popular cloud computing platform comprising a collection of remote computing services.
With this new capability, the AlgoSec Security Management Suite can unify and extend security policy management from traditional and next-generation firewalls deployed on-premises to Amazon Security Groups in the public cloud.
The platform is designed to offer centralized visibility, unification of auditing and compliance, and streamlining management across the business. Support for AWS is generally available for all AlgoSec Security Management Suite customers.
“Businesses are making the strategic decision to move to public cloud services like AWS to maximize business agility and to reduce costs,” Nimrod Reichenberg, vice president of marketing and strategy for AlgoSec, told eWEEK. “The greatest benefit of the public cloud platform is agility–the ability to quickly spin up and spin down servers based on capacity demands, thus ensuring constant application availability.”
The Security Management Suite enables companies utilizing AWS to centrally manage all on-premises firewalls policies alongside Amazon security groups to provide full visibility across the entire enterprise environment in a single console, and monitor changes to Amazon security groups to uncover problems such as unauthorized or risky changes, and inefficient or unnecessary policies.
“There are also significant cost savings from using a public cloud platform,” Reichenberg noted. “Organizations rent infrastructure and pay as they go rather than incurring the significant capital expenditures costs of purchasing infrastructure and the ongoing operational expenses of maintaining an on-premise data center.”
The suite offers users an automated and application-centric solution for managing complex policies across firewalls and related security infrastructure to improve both security and business agility.
The suite is also designed to help bridge traditional gaps between security, network and application teams by combining the company’s BusinessFlow, FireFlow and Firewall Analyzer offerings.
“The market for cloud security is ripe for consolidation, as there are many point products that provide security for the cloud. While these vendors offer rich functionality for companies that are entirely deployed in the cloud, they do not manage traditional on-premise firewalls,” Reichenberg said. “Yet companies that are in the process of deploying hybrid environments are not getting rid of their on-premise data centers any time soon, and they are facing the same core network security management challenges for their public IaaS as for their on-premise data centers.”
Therefore, he explained, there is a real need to manage the network security policy across both environments consistently, and the market is likely to see more organizations adopting automation and orchestration to manage security at the “speed of cloud.”
A recent survey conducted by the company found that 79 percent of organizations stated that they need better visibility in order to unify security policy management across their on-premise and public cloud environments, and according to IT research firm Gartner, nearly three-quarters of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments in 2015.