Sourcefire offers new services

       Cyber security firm Sourcefire is moving security into virtualisation while preparing to offer a core base pricing model to capture new opportunities in cloud computing.
       Seeing a green field market in the virtualisation environment driving the company's latest update Enterprise Threat Management solution which is coming out in the fourth quarter,"Sourcefire 3D System 4.9" can run on VMware Hypervisor, according to Tom McDonough, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sourcefire which is a Snort creator and a leader in cyber security.
       The product will have the same functionality with a look and feel similar to the traditional product that run on Intel base platform and it can help lower customers' additional hardware costs. The price point will be lower by approximately 10-15 percent.
       This can help business customers implement security as part of their virtualisation and cloud computing strategy.Moreover, it still maintains its unique advantage technology as a holistic solution that integrates Intrusion Prevention System, Real time Network Awareness and Real time User Awareness to reduce the total cost of ownership and increase productivity.
       For example, one of big customers in Fortune 100 migrated from Snort open source, which was invented by Sourcefire's founder, to commercial product 3D solution which helped to reduce track events from 21 million down to 2,000 events and reduced the number of security people from nine to two people to allocate staff in other security areas.
       This unique technology helped it grow faster in the IPS market by around 2.5 times. In a recent revenue announcement, the company reported growth of 28 percent compared with IPS market growth of 15-16 percent.
       Meanwhile the company is in the process of offering a new pricing model called "Core base pricing" to charge depending on the number of core CPUs which will help to maximise benefits for customers. The new pricing model is an alternative to existing models which charge by line speed of the network.
       "We see this as a new market. Currently, many companies focus on moving their applications on virtualisation computing but for security issues are still not in the top of their mind like in clientserver days when everyone moved applications out of mainframe until it caused security problems. This pricing model will make security go with the virtualisation environment,"McDonough said.
       Mark Nakrop Niamnamtham, Managing Director for nForce Security, an exclusive Sourcefire distributor in Thailand, added that the company is in discussion with some Internet data centre providers as partners to security products under the new core base pricing model.