Co-Founders, Bob Darabant (CEO) and John Peterson (CTO) announced the launch of Montego Networks, a new company whose Montego HyperSwitch is an innovative virtual security networking solution that delivers policy enforcement, access control, and secure switching for virtual networks.

Organizations are converting their data centers and physical computing platforms to leverage virtualized environments. According to the Yankee Group, more than 95% of businesses plan to install a virtualization solution. Virtualization platforms from vendors such as VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft create software-based simulations of physical network and server infrastructure. By consolidating simulated virtual machine (VM) resources on a high-performance physical host machine, virtualized environments allow organizations to consolidate physical servers, increase CPU utilization and reduce resource consumption. When aggregated, these savings allow organizations to substantially reduce data center operating costs San-Diego-Symphony-Finances , improve service quality, enhanced reliability, and more.

Unfortunately, virtualization incurs unique network and application security risks which, if left unaddressed, leave virtual machines, virtualized applications and critical data exposed to service interruptions, data theft, regulatory compliance violations and other threats.

"The challenges virtualization presents data center staff are analogous to what many network operation teams now face: how to secure a growing, mobile and diverse population of new devices flooding the enterprise. Instead of dealing with new wireless and mobile devices popping on the network, administrators face a virtualized sprawl of new server IP addresses and machine names appearing and moving around the network -- sometimes on a daily basis. This introduces new risks. It is critical for enterprises with plans to spin up large amounts of virtual machines to have a security strategy for virtualization," said Phil Hochmuth, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group.

An emerging class of network security solutions has attempted to address these vulnerabilities. However, they often offer limited coverage that may create a false sense of security. Alternately, they may consume excessive host machine CPU and memory resources and incur an impractical performance drain on the protected virtual environment.

The Montego HyperSwitch approaches virtualized network security from a new direction that integrates network policy enforcement and access control with a high-availability virtual security switch. This approach allows the Montego HyperSwitch to deliver advanced capabilities including policy-based virtual network partitioning, L2-L4 Firewall, Identity Firewall, Content Firewall, virtual network discovery, secure inter-VM communication, 802.1Q VLANs, 802.1D spanning tree, load-balanced Quality of Service (QoS), Policy Based Switching, Policy Based Traffic Mirroring and more.

"Security for virtual environments is imperative. While some security vendors are now touting security for virtual networks, users often find their solutions are incomplete or impractical," said Bob Darabant. "The Montego HyperSwitch is a completely new approach that integrates high performance virtual security, high-availability virtual switching and an open, interoperable security framework. This allows users to enjoy complete protection for their virtual networks along with the open flexibility to leverage their choice of multi-vendor security offerings."