Cyber Threat Protection Solution

The Challenge

Today's enterprise computing environments face constant threats from viruses, malwares, and malicious cyber attacks by hackers. Such threats are increasingly more sophisticated and harmful than ever before. Enterprises are under tremendous pressure to protect business and customer sensitive information from being stolen or compromised.

For cloud-based computing environment, such protection has become even more challenging. Corporations are considering cloud computing solutions and services into their business operation to save costs, increase productivity, and achieve business agility. However, many are struggling with the reality of security protection in a multi-tenant cloud environment that potentially inherits the risk of data leak, malicious intrusion, and security breach. This dilemma is further complicated by the requirement that the cloud service is not only catered to employees but also to external contractors, vendors, or customers.

When an enterprise computing environment is exposed to a cyber attack, IT must react instantly to contain or mitigate the attack. Cyber viruses or malwares can proliferate at an alarming rate and affect neighboring computers or virtual machines in a poorly protected environment. Existing firewall systems are typically deployed on the edge of the data center and are physical oriented. As a result, the security policies can not be directly associated with the elastic cloud resources. The rigid nature of the physical security infrastructure mitigates the effectiveness of prevention of cyber threats.

Imera Solution

• A Grid-Based Firewall Topology For Strengthening Security Protection - Imera solution enables IT to create a map of individual cloud nodes using a grid topology approach to further strengthen the security protection. The virtual firewall within each cloud node defines a hard boundary that acts as the building block of the grid structure. A security breach is confined by the node-level virtual firewall without impacting the security status of the entire grid. Imera secure grid approach enables IT to manage security beyond the physical network topology.
  
  

• Secure Virtual Vault for Multi-Tenancy Protection - Imera solution enables IT to build virtual vaults within a secure zone to segregate and lock down computing resources for different cloud tenants by configuring the vault-level virtual firewalls. All inbound and outbound traffic within each vault are restricted based on the rules and policies managed by IT. Access to each vault is provisioned based on user roles set up by IT. Each vault can be configured to connect with a white list of external resources to enable a customized computing environment for specific business flow. Cloud nodes within each vault can be managed without reconfiguring of physical network (e.g. routers, firewalls) or reallocating of physical computers. Each virtual vault can be created, altered, or removed instantly and effortlessly.
  
  

• Secure Zone Protected by Virtual Perimeter Firewall - Imera solution offers software-based virtual firewalls for IT to instantly enable a protective "wall" around the perimeter of a cloud computing environment. All inbound and outbound traffic within each zone are restricted based on the rules and policies managed by IT. No reconfiguration of physical network (e.g. routers, firewalls) is required. Access to each zone is provisioned and managed by IT. Each zone can be created, altered, or removed instantly and effortlessly. IT can easily create secure virtual zones to divide and manage different organizational operation within a company.
  
  

• Application Flow Control for Secure Tier-Based Computing - Imera solution enables IT to define a secure tier-based computing environment by using the grid topology. Application and data are hosted on separate cloud nodes in the grid to define different tiers, e.g. web server, application server, and database server. Each tier is protected by the node-level firewall and tightly chained together to form a multi-tier computing environment.
  
  

• Vulnerability Monitoring and Instant Alerts - Imera solution monitors all system events within the secure grid, identifies suspicious computing activities, and issues instant alerts to the appropriate IT personnel in the event of a security breach. IT can take proactive measures to guard the computing environment against malicious cyber threats.
  
  
• One Centralized Monitoring and Management Portal - Imera solution offers IT one centralized web portal to monitor and manage all activities within the secure grid. Detailed logs on each cloud node provide IT full visibility into users' activities and to ensure security compliance. Instant alerts on activity anomalies prepare IT to proactively response to security breaches. A suite of powerful tools is provided for IT to monitor, analyze, and report user activities for regulatory compliance and audit purposes.
  
  
• Hypervisor-Independent Virtual Security Architecture - Imera solution establishes virtual firewalls in the OS kernel of a virtual machine. It is totally independent from the hypervisor layer and it works in all virtual computing environments from any vendor.
  
  
• One Solution for Virtualized and Non-Virtualized Computing Environment - Imera solution enables IT to establish virtual topology in a cloud-based virtual machine computing environments or a non-virtualized physical computing environment. It works in the OS layer and is independent from the physical network and computing layer beneath. Both Windows and Unix operating platforms are supported and only one centralized portal is required to monitor and manage the operation.
  
  

Solution Key Benefits

• Instant Business and IT Agility - Enterprises are able to securely leverage cloud computing environment and rapidly adapt to the dynamic changes in business operation requirements without concern on multiple-tenancy security issues.
  
  
• Minimize IT Costs, Time, and Effort - IT can instantly deploy the same Imera solution on different virtual environment with different hypervisor technology from different vendors. The same solution can also be deployed in a virtualized and non-virtualized computing environment.
  
  
• Easy to Monitor and Manage with Centralized Administration Portal - All monitoring and management tasks can be performed on a single administration portal regardless of the type of hypervisor-based cloud environment or a non-virtualized physical computing environment.