vArmour Announces the Industry's Most Simple, Scalable and Economical Data Center and Cloud Security Architecture, "Project Ice Cream"

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 19, 2016) - vArmour, the data center and cloud security company and leader in application-aware micro-segmentation with advanced security analytics, today announced "Project Ice Cream," the release of its twelve-months-in-the-making new security architecture built for the requirements of cloud for simplicity, massive scale and economics. Built from core functionality of its flagship product, vArmour Distributed Security System (DSS), vArmour is delivering a new architecture based on of the vision it outlined late last year with "Multi-Cloud Security Architecture" to transform data center and cloud security.

Traditional data center security architectures are not easily ported to the cloud, nor should they be. Their original design was to protect the well-defined perimeter, but that notion faded with the advent of digitalization (including cloud computing, mobile, IoT) and the increasing sophistication of attackers. Traditional security controls to protect the network, applications, and data inside the data center and cloud are out of date and no longer valid. Security has to evolve with this sweeping transformation.

"Digitalization breaks the traditional infrastructure trust model. In the old, hardware-centric silos, assets and individuals outside the network perimeter were considered 'bad' while anyone inside was considered 'good,'" said Peter Christy, research director at 451 Group. "In today's cloud environments, security must adapt to a new architecture where trusted vs. untrusted users or workloads are identified at a much more granular level, and also where policies can scale dynamically with the assets being protected. Organizations cannot simply adapt technologies that were built for hardware and hope to make them work in a high-scale, virtualized world. They need to take advantage of new software-defined, virtually-deployed architectures for compute, and apply them to security."

"Hardware-based perimeter security appliances do not fit in clouds," said Marc Woolward, chief technology officer at vArmour. "Clouds are based on speed, scale and economics, which are the antithesis of these legacy systems. Our Ice Cream architecture harnesses the power of advanced distributed systems principles to deliver a fully capable security solution -- one that scales beyond the wildest dreams of legacy data center security technologies, such as NGFWs, and the abilities of weaker security controls based on agent-based packet filters."

Security vendors have attempted to cloudwash their offerings to be relevant in clouds by taking physical hardware-centric products and making virtualized copies. However, these virtualized versions are not simple to deploy and manage, cannot scale within and across clouds, and are based on hardware-centric pricing.

"As we move to a multi-cloud infrastructure, we need built-in security to remain agile and protect our clients' valuable IP," said Kevin Moore, Chief Security Officer at Fenwick & West LLP. "With vArmour DSS, we not only can detect events, but can also do something about it in a fast, simple and economical way."

Project Ice Cream
To extend vArmour's security leadership in data center and cloud, the company announced today the industry's most simple, scalable and economical architecture. Aptly named after something everyone loves, Project Ice Cream ensures:

• Simplicity

Security should be simple and agile. With Project Ice Cream, vArmour DSS can be downloaded, installed, deployed and micro-segmented in one hour. Security controls are independent of the network, infrastructure and workload. Likewise, they can now be delivered at the same speed of the infrastructure or workload being ordered -- something that traditionally takes days or weeks, with hardware-centric approaches or complex SDN deployments.

• Coverage 

Organizations require a solution that grows with it, especially at the unprecedented rate of cloud services adoption. With Project Ice Cream, security can scale across the largest data centers and cloud by instantly protecting one to 100,000 workloads across 1,000 hosts from different systems with a single, programmable fabric. One system can secure the approximate size of a Facebook pod. Organizations now have a single pane of glass of visibility to better understand what's happening in their data center and cloud, with their applications and users, to apply appropriate fine-grained controls to prevent threats.

• Performance

Performance is a key differentiator of effective security. With Project Ice Cream, vArmour's new architecture outperforms the fastest data center security appliances with as much as 10X the throughput while maintaining 100 million concurrent stateful application flows throughout the environment.

• Effectiveness

Security has to do more, offering a variety of security controls that would be traditionally available in individual point products that do not interoperate well. With Project Ice Cream, vArmour DSS offers a comprehensive, integrated solution that enables organizations to buy fewer products to protect inside their data center and cloud -- there's no more "complexity is the biggest enemy." vArmour's one-click capability enables security analysts to investigate an event and, if suspicious, immediately quarantine it. It's not just about detecting events, but doing something about them.

• Economical

Security solutions should take advantage of cloud consumption economics, such as pay-as-you-grow -- instead of traditional "buy ahead or buy really ahead" approaches. With vArmour, customers no longer have to bear highly disruptive hardware firewall refresh cycles. vArmour offers its software at less than half the cost** of alternative micro-segmentation approaches that include SDNs and NGFWs.

The need for the capabilities of Project Ice Cream has reached the market at a critical time. As more enterprises adopt a multi-cloud infrastructure, combined with ever increasing attacker sophistication, security professionals must look ahead to build security in via software that trumps existing hardware-based perimeter-centric models.

To see learn more about Project Ice Cream, download a By The Numbers Infographic here or check out our blog here.

* vArmour offers up to 9 Tbps of throughput but may be higher based on configuration.

** Pricing based on list pricing of leading SDN providers.

About vArmour
Based in Mountain View, CA, vArmour is the data center and cloud security company, and the leader in application-aware micro-segmentation with advanced security analytics. The company was founded in 2011 and is backed by top investors including Highland Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Citi Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, and Allegis Capital. The vArmour DSS Distributed Security System is deployed in a significant number of the world's largest banks, telecom service providers, government agencies, healthcare providers, and retailers, and is leading the industry with a new patented, distributed approach to data security that allows organizations to deliver IT at the speed of business. Along with partners like Amazon and HPE, vArmour secures many of the largest data center and cloud environments in the world. Learn more at www.varmour.com