News

Reflex Addresses Dynamic Policy Enforcement in Virtualized Environments

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 05/08/09

Reflex Systems has launched vTrust, a new function in its Virtualization Management Center (VMC), to bolster policy management in virtual environments. vTrust taps VMware's vNetwork and VMsafe application programming interfaces (APIs) to bolster security in the newly launched vSphere 4, VMware's new cloud operating environment.

"Virtual environments are dynamic by nature, and policy management solutions must adapt elastically to infrastructure changes" said CEO, Pete Privateer. "Reflex vTrust enables administrators to create and enforce not just security rules but the more general case of data center policies and best practices. vTrust helps automate data center operations across all virtual resources whether in the corporate data center or hosted in the cloud. This, in turn, leads to improved efficiency through data center automation and reduced IT staffing costs, while ensuring compliance with corporate policy and government mandates."

vTrust provides asset classification, virtual trust zones, dynamic network control, and adaptive roaming policies that move with assets regardless of physical location or network connection.

As Ken Owens, technical vice president of security and server technologies of Savvis, a provider of managed IT infrastructure and cloud computing solutions, explained, "Due to the nature of VMs, virtual infrastructure environments can change quite often, several times a day. Traditional security and policy enforcement techniques are challenging to apply under these conditions. The addition of the VMSafe program is crucial to VMware's virtualization initiative because it enables solutions like Reflex's vTrust to give us the technology to properly enforce policies in such a dynamic environment."

Administrators can use virtual meta tagging (vmTags) to organize and group virtual assets and then define policies or best practices based on the asset properties or classification. Polices based on vmTags are automatically updated as the environment changes.

Higher ed customers of Reflex products include Harvard University in Cambridge, MA; Mississippi State University; and Clark Atlanta University in Georgia.