WatchGuard enhances security for cloud infrastructures

WatchGuard Technologies, a global leader in business security solutions, has announced the beta version of its leading next-generation security UTM product as a virtual appliance named XTMv. The new WatchGuard XTMv series of virtual firewalls provides unparalleled network security and advanced protection of applications and data.

“The powerful firewall, integrated threat management and application control, and bundled easy-to-use business-focused management suite that define WatchGuard XTM, have helped hundreds of thousands of organisations run their businesses securely. Now, WatchGuard will enable those companies to leverage the consolidation savings and business agility of virtualisation and private clouds with the same level of confidence,” said Roger Klorese, Director of Product Management at WatchGuard Technologies.

“The response to the extension of WatchGuard XTM security to virtual infrastructures has far exceeded our expectations, with hundreds of partners and customers requesting early access.”

XTMv is now available in beta version to meet the needs of small, midsize and large-scale distributed environments. XTMv provides the same type of high security offered by WatchGuard XTM series hardware appliances, including Application Control, Reputation Enabled Defence, intrusion prevention, gateway anti-virus, Web blocking, traffic shaping, and more.

“WatchGuard has been a vital component of our enterprise infrastructure for over 12 years now,” says James Bender, Director of Technical Services, MCA. “Their offering application layer capabilities in the late 90s sealed our decision to market their firewall to our customers as our security appliance solution. Being a customer first, I appreciated the ease of management, friendly interface, and bundled features on the box that other vendors charge an arm and a leg for. This beta release has me very excited. The virtualised XTM solution allows us to spin up virtualised firewalls that leverage our high-performance and highly available x86/x64 infrastructure. XTMv provides us with scalable access control solutions to protect specific virtual machines and make our cloud offerings a reality.”

WatchGuard XTMv series can manage traffic passing within the virtual infrastructure and across internal networks between virtual machines in the same cluster or on the same server; thus XTMv is well suited to implement security policies between applications, user communities or tenants. WatchGuard XTMv will be initially supported on VMware vSphere.

Additional beta testers will be added to the programme. Users may request access through this application: https://watchguard.wufoo.com/forms/sign-up-for-the-watchguard-xtmv-beta-program/.