Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, a strategy consulting, market research and analyst firm, says she is impressed with CloudPassage. "It appears that they are focused on some difficult problems with cloud security. Cloud security is complicated because of issues related to how and what individuals and groups can access, based on roles and authorization. In addition, you have compliance issues related to geographies and data location."
CloudPassage's core architecture, on which the Halo SVM and Halo Firewall products are built, includes two components: Halo Daemon and Halo Grid. Halo Daemon is a lightweight (under 2Mbyte) software component that runs as a service on each cloud server and monitors server security factors such as IP addressing, installed software, running processes and open network ports. Halo Grid is an analytics tool that evaluates data collected by the Halo Daemon and, using business rules and policies, makes decisions based on the data to create alerts and reports or even update security parameters.
Currently, CloudPassages has built 18 different templates for Linux servers (expect support for Windows servers later this year) and continues to build more templates. Customers can create policies, as well. Communication between the Dameons and Grid is encrypted.
Halo SVM assesses exposures on cloud servers; it can scan and assess server configurations continuously. Halo Firewall controls server attack surfaces by centralizing and automating host-based firewall management and lets customers manage their firewall policies via a graphical Web front end.
It also automatically updates individual host-based firewall configurations whenever cloud servers are added or removed--including server cloning or cloudbursting operations--with zero intervention by system administrators, the company says, adding that it also addresses the issues of dynamic public cloud IP addressing,
