Valtix vs. Firewall Virtual Appliances
DON’T TRUST CLOUD SECURITY
TO LEGACY BOXES
Virtual firewall appliance (Palo Alto Networks, Checkpoint, etc) vendors even admit that their legacy model doesn’t work in the cloud. Yet, many have tried to make virtual appliances work there – only to pay the cost of never-ending projects, failures, and troubleshooting. The result: valuable time away from their main goal – keeping the business secure while enabling agility.
Fork Lifting Virtual Appliances (NGFW, WAF)
Wastes Millions, Adds Risk, Slows Business
Complex to Operate
Unsupported scripts are expensive and complex to customize and maintain.
Bottom Line Impact:
Wasted Time and Money
No Cloud Context
Lack of cloud-native workload identity or posture visibility leads to poor security coverage.
Bottom Line Impact:
Elevated Security Risk
Not Aligned to DevOps
Scale must be managed manually and lack of fully-supported Terraform IaC slows down DevOps.
Bottom Line Impact:
Reduced Business Agility
Virtual Appliances Fail to Deliver in the Cloud
Need
Virtual Appliances
Valtix
Need:
Deployment
Virtual Appliances:
Requires complex orchestration of network constructs to enable appropriate routing. This takes skilled resources and months of effort.
Valtix:
Valtix takes care of the orchestration and can be enabled in most environments in minutes.
Need:
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Automation
Virtual Appliances:
The appliance vendors’ Terraform providers generally cover most of the core features, but may leave out some of the advanced features and aren’t updated consistently. Unfortunately, feature-level support is not well documented so it’s important to test all the features that you plan to use.
Valtix:
Valtix has a fully supported and feature-rich Terraform provider that is regularly updated. Most Valtix customers have fully automated their security using Terraform.
Need:
Security Posture
Virtual Appliances:
Virtual Firewalls give you no visibility into cloud workloads, infrastructure, or network security posture. This leads to manual efforts to identify security needs.
Valtix:
Valtix provides visibility of posture via integration into each CSPs APIs to continuously discover workloads, traffic flows, and current posture issues.
Need:
Visibility and Control of PaaS
Virtual Appliances:
Virtual Firewalls do not provide any PaaS or cloud service specific protections. There are no APP-IDs for the 100s of cloud services from AWS, Azure or GCP. While IAM sets the basic access control policy, don’t assume that an attacker won’t “assume” the role of a compromised instance.
Valtix:
Valtix provides a solution for APIs, serverless, and PaaS services such as S3. By placing a Valtix Gateway inline with network traffic (ingress, egress and east-west) and applying best practice security, resources can be protected against external threats and from data exfiltration via egress.
Need:
Zero Trust Microsegmentation
Virtual Appliances:
Lack of dynamic policy tied to cloud tags makes implementing microsegmentation with legacy virtual appliances impossible.
Valtix:
Valtix Dynamic Multi-Cloud Policy(™) with association to CSP tags means that microsegmentation policies can be delivered granulary in a way that adapts as the environment changes or new workloads are added.
Need:
Protection of Cloud Workloads
Virtual Appliances:
Most workloads in the cloud are ultimately web apps. If you want to protect them, you’ll need multiple appliances to cover both web application firewall (WAF) and network firewall (NGFW).
Valtix:
Valtix provides an integrated platform including best-in-class network firewall and WAF built to protect cloud workloads.
Need:
Incident Response
Virtual Appliances:
Packet Captures (PCAPs) are essential for incident responders looking for rich forensics on attacks. Virtual appliances don’t enable PCAPs at scale or in an automated way.
Valtix:
Valtix users can leverage visibility into threats and attacks to automate PCAPs for incident responders.
Need:
TLS Decryption
Virtual Appliances:
Performance implications make trying to do TLS decryption at scale impractically costly. As a result, organizations must choose carefully where they want to inspect traffic.
Valtix:
Valtix patented architecture delivers low-latency TLS decryption at scale. Inspect the content of encrypted traffic with single-pass data inspection that provides industry-leading speed. TLS 1.2 with ‘Perfect Forward Security’ (PFS) is fully supported.
Need:
Key Management
Virtual Appliances:
No integration with cloud-based secrets managers. This means that organizations must stand up and maintain their own (cost, complexity).
Valtix:
Valtix enables full integration with cloud provider key managers.