Managed Cloud-Based Firewall Service

Protecting Corporate Resources While Saving You Money

Business Drivers

For every company with sensitive business information, their top concern is to ensure that their employees, customers, and business partners get the information they need over a secure network, without compromising any data.

Challenges and Needs

First and foremost, companies are looking to protect the applications and corporate resources whether they reside within the enterprise or a public storage/compute cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and IBM Cloudburst), which are at the core of their business, from unauthorized access and malicious threats as the data is transmitted back and forth across the network.

Network security is a challenge. The rules change every day as criminals and hackers find new ways to compromise resources. Keeping up with the race requires engineers possessing a dedicated focus toward perpetually monitoring threats and tuning network defenses against them. This level of talent is in high demand. Virtela alleviates the challenge by alerting customers as the landscape changes and recommending options if the severity justifies service modifications. Customers may accept Virtela recommendations or suggest alternatives more aligned with their requirements. Once a threat and response are agreed upon, services are updated to mitigate all newfound threats.

At the crux of the matter is staying ahead with monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting all security-related events in real time-without risking a moment's break in service. But keeping up with the latest security threats requires constantly fine-tuning the firewall configuration, handling event-correlation and log-retention tasks, and staying on top of network security rules.

Companies are discovering that accomplishing all this would mean hiring new IT security staff or training current staff-a solution that isn't fiscally feasible. It would take at least five new staff members dedicated full-time and around the clock, or six to nine months of training to get existing staff up to speed on the policies and tools. Add to that the need to invest in infrastructure, develop processes, and acquire new technology.

Managed Cloud-Based Firewall Service Overview

Virtela is perfectly positioned to complement your daily firewall monitoring, management, and maintenance tasks, or take the whole thing off your hands. Offering skillful application of security policies and flexible service options, you can be sure that your corporate network-and the applications and business resources traveling across it-is well-protected.

The service ultimately lets good traffic in and blocks bad traffic from entering your network. It safeguards the interfaces between LAN, WAN, Internet and public storage/compute clouds using stateful firewall inspection technologies which go beyond basic access control list and packet filtering functions.

Managed Cloud-based Firewall service features include:

  • Managed, cloud-based service. Enabled by Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC), the Managed Cloud-based Firewall service saves you time and money, with its instant service activation, simplicity of use, and elimination of up-front investments in hardware or ongoing costs for additional staff.
  • Flexible implementation options. With Virtela, you have the option to choose managed, cloud-based, CPE-based, or hybrid designs based on your specific needs, be they monitoring only or full management. This approach is customized to address your business, budget, or specific location and resource requirements.  Supported firewalls include Cisco, Check Point, IBM, and Juniper. This wide range of supported vendors makes it easy to transition the maintenance and management of existing firewalls that you have in your IT infrastructure.
  • Predictive analytics. Using VirtelaPredict technology, Virtela can diagnose more than 95 percent of potential enterprise network and security issues before they can impact network health. The service quickly responds to and remediates issues-or avoids them altogether-helping you achieve a 5x reduction in downtime.
  • Expertise, tools, and processes. You can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the monitoring and management of your existing security devices are in the hands of the experts. Virtela has SAS-70 and ITIL certified and compliant global operations centers. No scrambling to hire additional staff, train existing staff, or throw money at expensive technology. Virtela can review and apply vendor patches and security updates to keep your business secure.
  • Audit and compliance tools. Integration of Virtela's security information and event monitoring (SIEM) and log retention and management tools give you the necessary event-correlation capabilities and reporting that meet strict compliance requirements (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, GLB, and PCI, for example).
  • Inventory management and configuration modeling. The service allows your company to automatically identify devices within your environment and view the topology within the Virtela dashboard. This can help with rightsizing equipment maintenance spend for CPE-based implementations. It also can model the impact of configuration changes before they are made, further reducing risk of downtime by avoiding common mistakes due to human error.
  • Real-time notification of events. Virtela provides real-time notification of security events via VirtelaView, Virtela's online customer portal.
  • Exceptional customer support. Virtela is committed to going the extra mile and doing what it takes to provide the best service for its customers.  With a business model that's carrier, vendor and technology independent, you can count on flexible, customized solutions--integrating the best partners to meet your specific needs.  Virtela maintains an impressive 99 percent rate for opening trouble tickets proactively and responds quickly with 12-second average speed to answer time.  And you can be assured of a Tier 1 Engineer technical support.

Business Benefits

The key benefits to your business are as follows:

  • Secure new applications and locations quickly. Need to secure a new application or new remote locations around the world? With Virtela, you can turn on firewall capabilities within minutes from the cloud, as you need it.
  • Increase business productivity. With less downtime, faster resolution of issues, and secure traffic across the network, the service helps your employees and partners become more efficient.
  • Reduce burden on IT. It's no fun getting mired in the complexity of firewall technologies and security policies-and not getting it right the first time can put your company at risk of security attacks. Virtela's Managed Cloud-Based Firewall service eliminates all the hassle, so you can focus on what's important: your business.
  • Realize significant cost savings. There's no question that you'll save money with the Managed Cloud-Based Firewall service. Besides avoiding the expense of adding to your staff or purchasing firewall technology, Virtela provides the service for a low monthly charge for each location.

"No other provider could deliver the wealth of managed security services on a worldwide basis that Virtela provides through a highly experienced single point of contact. Virtela's obsession with customer satisfaction has remained consistent from day one."--GAB Robins

 

Related Resources

FAQs: Extending Defense-in-depth into the Cloud (PDF)
Podcast: Extending Defense-in-Depth into the Cloud (MP3)
Analyst Report: A Case for Unified Network Security Outsourcing (PDF)