HITS
NSS Labs Expands Research Offerings with New Virtual Firewall Test (HITS)
Story Highlights
NSS Labs released a new test methodology for virtual firewalls. Firewalls have undergone several stages of development, from early packet filtering and circuit relay firewalls to application layer (proxy-based) and dynamic packet filtering firewalls. Throughout their history, the goal of the firewall has been to enforce an access control policy between a trusted network and an untrusted network.
“With production computing shifting to the cloud, demand for virtual firewalls is increasing dramatically,” said Mike Spanbauer, NSS Labs VP of Security, Test & Advisory. “As a result, our enterprise customers have been clamoring for NSS to test this technology so they can gain better insight and make fact-based purchasing decisions.”
The adoption of virtualization and cloud computing has driven the need for virtual firewalls, designed to operate in a virtualized environment and to protect virtual resources. As such, a virtual firewall is deployed either on or as an integrated part of the hypervisor, and has the ability to dynamically scale on demand. A major challenge to virtual firewall adoption is understanding security effectiveness and performance impact.
To address these challenges, NSS Labs has developed a new test methodology to evaluate virtual firewalls.
The scope of the test will include: Security effectiveness, Resistance to evasion, Stability, Performance, Management, and Total cost of ownership (TCO).
