Cloud Hosting

Starting July 24, CloudPassage will extend its SaaS Halo cloud server security to cloud servers running Windows in public and hybrid cloud environments.

The company found in a recent survey that 74% of cloud users are running a mix of both Windows and Linux servers in the cloud.

It estimates that Windows servers, which are exposed to exploits such as the recent RDP vulnerabilities announced by Microsoft, make up more than 40% of the public IaaS market. Halo guards against attacks in the cloud and protects RDP and other sensitive services, while automating other Windows cloud server security tasks.

Since Halo, which is advertised as the first security and compliance platform purpose-built for elastic cloud environments, already supports all the major Linux distributions, users and cloud providers can centrally manage dynamic firewalls across multiple operating systems, lock down administrative and application ports with what is supposed to be a unique SMS-powered multi-factor authentication service, and be notified of critical cloud server security events.

451 Research wades in with the observation that "Enterprises aren't looking for a piece-meal solution, but one that will address vulnerabilities in any environment, so they can rest assured that their cloud servers are secure."

Obviously it helps that the security is automated particularly in highly scalable deployments and handles security policies across Windows and Linux servers as a single group.

Halo manages server security configuration, host-based firewalls, intrusion detection and server account auditing from one system.

Halo includes GhostPorts multi-factor authentication, which now supports SMS authentication for cloud servers to help customers control access to administrative and other applications. CloudPassage says protecting access to administrative servers like Windows RDP is critical in the cloud, where there is no outer layer of access control and administrative ports are often left open to the world.

Besides the coming Windows 2008R1 and R2 support, Halo supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and Amazon Linux. It runs on servers in any public or private cloud environment, including Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid, VMware, OpenStack and other virtualization and cloud stacks.

See the original post:
Cloud Computing: CloudPassage Extends Halo to Cloud-y Windows Servers