News

Third Brigade Upgrades Security Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/23/09

Third Brigade has launched Third Brigade Deep Security 6, which provides server and application security. The latest release adds three product enhancements to complement the existing Deep Security host intrusion prevention system and firewall.

First, the system integrates with VMware vCenter to simplify deployment and give increased visibility into an organization's VMware environment. Although managing the security of virtual machines is the same as for their physical counterparts, what's more challenging is having visibility into whether a virtual machine is "paused" or offline.

Second, two new product modules--integrity monitoring and log inspection--have been added to support PCI compliance initiatives and detect malicious behavior targeting virtual machines and physical servers. The new integrity monitoring module generates alerts on operating system and application changes that could signal attacks, while the new log inspection module is built using the multiplatform log monitoring capabilities of the OSSEC open source host intrusion detection project.

Third, the company has modified its packaging scheme to allow its security modules to be purchased individually or as a set and then deployed and managed centrally.

"Because of the open nature of a university's IT environment, the perimeter gets bombarded from all sides, and we are constantly asked to do more with very little resources," said Ralph Michaelis, CIO at Carleton University. "We turned to Third Brigade for our physical and virtual server protection and are now looking to the cloud to increase IT efficiencies, while maintaining the same level of security."

"Enterprises oftentimes find themselves deploying several small physical VMware ESX clusters in order to meet security zoning requirements," said Chris Wolf, senior analyst and virtualization expert for Burton Group. "Host-based security deployed to VM guest operating systems can allow organizations to move enterprise security to the virtual infrastructure, which may allow them to realize higher consolidation densities and more efficient utilization of shared infrastructure."

The Deep Security 6 modules are available for Microsoft Windows, Solaris, Red Hat, and SUSE server platforms. They work with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft virtualization platforms. The software also protects these servers and applications when deployed in cloud computing environments such as Amazon EC2, GoGrid, or others.