GuardiCore, an Israeli data center security startup, announced in August that they completed an $11 million round of fundraising led by Battery Ventures. The company was looking to financially support a new technology it developed that will stop threats from moving to different locations once inside a data center.
The increasing popularity of virtualization has made it difficult for those operating data centers to monitor and follow attacks that have gained access to servers.
"When multiple pairs of virtual machines communicate at rates of gigabits per second, it is practically impossible to apply context aware security controls," GardiCore's website stated.
Modern security techniques – such as IDS, deep packet inspection, IPS, sandboxing and threat emulation – are not able to scale to the terabit levels necessary for intra-data center traffic, making them nearly impossible to implement with any success. In today's data centers, applications are distributed more widely and there is a greater flow of traffic within the facility, meaning not all of the threats facing a data center would necessarily pass through existing security mechanisms.
The new security platform developed by GuardiCore targets the techniques that detect and prevent attacks during their propagation and control phases. The first platform component offered by the company is Active Honeypot?, which evades attacks by surreptitiously rerouting traffic to a highly monitored 'ambush' server, allowing data centers to detect and eliminate threats in their early stages.
"Powered by software-defined networking methodologies and recent advances in virtualization, our solution is scalable to multi-terabit traffic rates," said GuardiCore cheif executive Pavel Gurvich.. "GuardiCore's mission is simple: to provide security and IT executives with advanced tools to win the war against cyber-attacks."
Currently GuardiCore's security offerings are being tested on the private clouds and data centers of leading enterprises and service providers. The money put together during the fundraising round will be used to productize and market the technology to new businesses.
