A recent research from ABI Research reveals that virtualization of data centers is driving the adoption of next-generation firewalls (NGWF).
ABI Research believes that there is a niche market for NGWF for virtualized data centers, valued at US$375,000 in 2014.
According to ABI Research, there is an emerging need for “virtualization-aware” security solutions that monitor intra-server communications flows and protect virtual resources.
Data center operators today are under pressure to roll out new applications and services faster than ever before. To address these, they are turning to technologies like virtualization, software-defined networking, and cloud computing.
Virtualization of data centers enables organizations to utilize their data center hardware infrastructure effectively, leading to reduction in costs, and improvements in operational efficiencies. As traditional data centers evolve to virtualized and cloud computing environments, they pose significant new security challenges that need to be addressed.
Traditional tools such as antivirus and firewalls fail to address the dynamic nature of the virtualized environment, and cannot track policies to virtual machine creation or movement. This is leaving organizations open to the risk of cyberattacks and loss of critical business data.
Next-generation firewalls (NGFW) have emerged as the security solution of choice for many virtualized data centers as they provide a security architecture that can protect, scale, and evolve with virtualization needs, ABI Research said.
“NGFWs deliver much more granular control than traditional firewalls by being application and user aware, which in turn ensures better security without impacting user productivity,” says Monolina Sen, ABI Research’s Senior Analyst in Cybersecurity.
Players like Trend Micro, Cisco, Imperva, NTT Com Security, Centrify, Veeam Software, and others offer innovative and interesting offerings in the data-center virtualization security market.
