Catbird, which already sells its own VM security and protection toolset called vSecurity, has entered into a partnership to OEM VMware’s vShield App technology. Catbird will include it in a future version of its own software scheduled for later this year. vShield is an inline firewall for VM hypervisors, something missing from vSecurity.
Earlier, VMware acquired BlueLane, which is a different security product that does mostly packet filtering but not true stateful packet inspection, the core of most modern firewalls.
Confusingly, vShield has a number of different components in its family: the vShield App is the only part of the technology that VMware is entering into the OEM arrangement with Catbird. This piece protects the Web protocols and other applications. Trend Micro, for example, makes use of the vShield Endpoint piece.
This partnership helps Catbird gets a further leg up into this marketplace. With the addition of VMware vShield into vSecurity’s Control Center, customers can dynamically control network access between VMs; Catbird’s policy enforcer will include full VMware vShield controls and can enforce various compliance standards.
Their vSecurity product also has network access controls and VM intrusion detection and compliance policy management. Catbird also supports Citrix Xen hypervisors and will continue to do so, although of course the Xen edition will lack any vShield features.
For more information about these products, you can read our two-part series on VM protection products here.
Interestingly, the agreement between VMware and Catbird was signed several months ago and the engineering teams from both companies have been hard at work with the integration process.
Note: an earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that the vShield App was an acquisition by Catbird.
