John Fomook, director of worldwide marketing at the Cupertino, California-based developer, said it had made tentative announcements around security in 2004 and 2005, primarily around the containment of zero-day exploits and attacks that take place after a security vulnerability has been announce, but before a patch is available.
Now Packeteer will go further, next month publishing what it calls the Orange Book for deploying PacketShaper (in a reference to the US government’s Orange Book for B2 security, published in the eighties). It’ll be a freely available user manual, specific to our security capabilities, Fomook said.
Beyond that, the company has more in the pipeline, enhancing its security offer both from endigenous developments and through partnerships with dedicated players in that market. Fomook cited, by way of example, Packeteer’s existing partnership with Q1 Labs Inc, a security developer. Q1 Labs announced at the RSA Conference in San Jose, California, recently that it can now feed flow detail records from PacketShaper into its QRadar product, and combine them with other data it has collected separately for greater application security and easier monitoring of a converging network and security architecture.
Packeteer is not alone among optimization/acceleration vendors in feeling the need to address network security with its technology, or perhaps in identifying the business opportunity that such a move represents.
Rival vendor Expand Networks Inc has already had a security module for its Accelerator platform for some time and has made it a default feature of the now converged offering of optimization, acceleration and security it has called Expand Compass.
Fomook argued that the competition doesn’t have our depth of understanding of what goes on in the network. We identify and control over 500 applications, have been in the business for ten years and have 22 patents.