Juniper Buys Altor Networks For Virtual Security

Juniper Networks announced today it has bought virtual security vendor Altor Networks for $95 million (£60 million).

The acquisition builds on an existing relationship between the two companies and Juniper actually invested in the company earlier this year. Founded in 2007, Altor specialises in intrusion prevention, firewall and monitoring for virtual environments.

Physical And Virtual Security

Juniper seeks to deliver integrated, scalable security architecture protecting physical and virtual systems through the purchase.

“Juniper is excited to acquire one of the industry’s leading virtualisation security vendors and the extremely talented team that built it,” said Mark Bauhaus, executive vice president and general manager of Service Layer Technologies at Juniper Networks, in a statement. “This acquisition will extend our leadership in data centre and cloud security and will enable customers to deploy a consistent set of security services across their physical and virtual infrastructure, while delivering lowest total cost of ownership.”

Forrester Research analyst Chenxi Wang noted that Altor has already integrated with Juniper that gives Juniper’s firewall visibility into traffic between virtual machines.

“They’ve also done a bunch of take to market efforts together,” she said. “The cultures of the two companies are similar – both are networking appliance companies; the founders of Alto came from Check Point.”

Neil MacDonald, an analyst with Gartner, blogged that the acquisition makes perfect sense for Juniper, which is trailing other vendors such as IBM and Cisco in delivering “virtualised implementations of [its] security controls.”

“Vendors of stand-alone point solutions for virtualised security controls have a diminishing window of opportunity to establish themselves or be acquired,” he blogged. “Longer term, security vendors should provide security services that can be delivered via physical appliances, virtual appliances, cloud-based services or a combination of all three. Organisations ca not use 100 percent virtualised security controls any more than they can use 100 percent physically-delivered security controls. We need both and vendors should deliver both.”