CloudPassage has announced the release of the Halo Firewall which controls server attack surfaces by centralizing and automating host-based firewall management, the preferred alternative to traditional enterprise perimeter firewalls. Providing customers with unified cloud-wide firewall policy management from a graphical web front-end, Halo Firewall eliminates the untenable operational overhead and likely errors associated with manual host-based firewall management. This new product, reports PR Newswire, automatically updates individual host-based firewall configurations whenever cloud servers are added or removed – including server cloning or cloudbursting operations – with zero intervention by system administrators.
“According to Neil MacDonald, VP and Gartner Fellow, the number one concern preventing enterprises from adopting public cloud computing is security. ‘As organizations shift workloads to cloud-based providers, it is imperative that security isn’t weakened,’ he said. ‘Like on-premises workloads, organizations need to minimize attack surfaces, patch vulnerable software and ensure security configurations are maintained as workloads move to the cloud. However, unlike on-premises workloads, security policy enforcement in the cloud must be enforceable regardless of location and scalable elastically to potentially thousands of hosts.'”