Virtualization is fueling an upheaval in today’s datacenters, resulting in architectures that are oftentimes a mix of private and public cloud computing environments. The benefits of cloud computing are well—known, so too are the security challenges, exemplified by recent high—profile security incidents. Just as an attack or compromise within your physical data center is a significant incident, the impact of a compromise in your virtualized environment is amplified because your workloads, some of which use varied trust levels, and the associated data are centralized, without any security barriers in between to keep them segmented. If your virtual environment is compromised, the attacker has access to your entire virtualized environment. The term “normal business hours” no longer applies. To keep pace with the online—all—the—time world, virtualization technology allows your applications and data to be deployed across public, private, and hybrid cloud—computing environments to more easily adapt and support your business demands.

Palo Alto Network’s™ next generation security platform lets you safely enable applications through granular visibility and policy based control, and then prevent both known and unknown threats from moving laterally (VM to VM), thereby reducing risk and improving your security efficacy overall. Plus, centralized management and native automation features ensure that security keeps pace with your business. Today’s cyberthreats commonly compromise an individual workstation, or user, and then move across the network, looking for a target. Within your virtual network, cyberthreats move laterally from VM to VM in an east — west manner, placing your mission—critical applications and data at risk. Exerting application—level control using Zero Trust principles in between VMs will reduce the threat footprint while applying policies to block both known and unknown threats. Security best practices dictate that your mission—critical applications and data should be isolated in secure segments using Zero Trust (“never trust, always verify”) principles as a means of controlling access.

Next—Gen Security For Private And Public Clouds

The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ is a virtualized form factor of our next—generation firewall that can be deployed in a range of private and public cloud computing environments based on technologies from VMware™, Amazon Web Services™, Microsoft™, Citrix™ and KVM. The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ natively analyzes all traffic in a single pass to determine the application identity, the content within, and the user identity. These core elements of your business can then be used as integral components of your security policy, enabling you to improve your security efficacy through a positive control model and reduce your incident response time though complete visibility into applications across all ports. In both private and public cloud environments, the Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ can be deployed as a perimeter gateway, an IPsec VPN termination point, and a segmentation gateway, protecting your workloads with application enablement and threat prevention policies. The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ combines next generation firewall security and advanced threat prevention to protect your virtualized environments from advanced cyberthreats.

Securing The Public And Private Clouds

Defined as an environment in which you are responsible for the management of all aspects of the virtualization, hardware, compute, networking and security, a private cloud is often considered to be synonymous with your data center, and in fact, many data centers are 100 percent virtualized using VMware™, Microsoft Hyper—V^™, KVM or other private cloud technologies. The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ allows you to protect your private cloud infrastructure using application enablement policies while simultaneously preventing known and unknown threats. The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ supports the following private cloud environments: VMware ESXi™ and NSX^™, Citrix NetScaler SDX™, Microsoft Hyper—V™ and KVM/OpenStack^™. In a public cloud, ensuring your applications and data are kept safe from attackers is your responsibility, and that is where the Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ can help. The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ protects your public cloud infrastructure using application enablement policies while simultaneously preventing known and unknown threats. The Palo Alto Networks VM—Series™ supports the following public cloud environments: VMware vCloud Air™, Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) and Microsoft Azure™.