Telstra has announced a strategic partnership with California-based vArmour, a data centre and cloud security company that helps organisations visualise and protect their data. The partnership includes an investment by Telstra Ventures as part of vArmour’s recent US$41 million Series D funding round.
Mark Sherman, Managing Director of Telstra Ventures, said the investment was driven by vAmour’s success in developing a solution that gives organisations application-layer visibility and control of their network and users to prevent, detect and respond to cyber-attacks and security breaches.
“Cloud services and virtualisation drive major cost savings and can improve IT agility, but they also bring new security challenges that traditional hardware-centric security models alone cannot address. Today, around 80% of data centre traffic travels within the centre itself, not crossing the traditional perimeter, creating an new dynamic and set of challenges,” said Sherman.
“vArmour provides hundreds of organisations globally, include major banks, government agencies and healthcare providers, with security controls via standard APIs and a visibility engine. These controls can stop the internal spread of threats by enforcing micro-segmentation and tailored security policies across multiple locations and services.”
Global expansion
Keith Stewart, vArmour’s Vice President of Strategic Markets, said the recent investment by Telstra and others in their latest funding round would support the company’s global expansion, while the partnership with Telstra would accelerate the distribution of their Distributed Security System particularly in Australia and the Asia Pacific.
“Our model has proven to be effective, cost efficient and scalable. We can protect up to 100,000 workloads across 1,000 hosts in a single solution. With the costs of cybercrime estimated to quadruple to US$2 trillion by 2019, we see some great opportunities to partner with Telstra in delivering ICT solutions to a larger client base,” said Stewart.
Jeremy Howe, Telstra Director of IP Data and Security Solutions, said the partnership adds vArmour’s leading security solutions to Telstra’s portfolio of enterprise services and develops security consulting and managed services for its customers in the longer term.
“vArmour’s distributed security software addresses the problem of traffic blindspots inside data centres. This helps businesses protect themselves from one of the critical emerging threats in the security environment, in addition to the benefits of having greater visibility of what is going on with your data,” said Howe.
“We see a growing demand among enterprise customers for solutions that help them secure their data in a private, public and hybrid cloud mix. One of the main concerns companies have in embracing cloud services is data control and security.”