Wedge Networks has a new software-based security solution that it says delivers on the promises of software-defined networking (SDN): cheaper infrastructure costs, easy scalability, and performance similar to hardware-based offerings.
Wedge recently participated in an network function virtualization(NFV) testing demonstration with Spirent at Interop that it said was the first-ever demo of network function virtualization for security, or NFV-S. The demo included provisioning virtual devices with the Wedge NFV-S solution.
Hongwen Zhang, chief executive officer and co-founder of Canada-based Wedge Networks, said that the telecom industry is facing “very, very large shifts in the network.”
“The changing of the industry is really making security very difficult,” he added. “Each year, the industry has tremendous suffering from security breaches, even though we spend about about $60 billion on network security. It is very difficult to get a good security solutions into today’s end-points.”
In a recent white paper on NFV-S, Wedge said that push for increased mobile access has been a significant driver for the need for new security approaches.
“The rapid shift to cloud, mobility and consumerization of IT has exposed many new security vulnerabilities, leading to another generation of even more sophisticated and severe security breaches,” the company said in the white paper. Traditionally, network security solutions have been proprietary hardware-based, often difficult to change or add new functions to because of constraints on space and power. The company went on to criticize current NFV solutions on-offer, saying that the current generation is “simply repackaged VM systems with third party pieces cobbled together in piecemeal fashion. They cannot satisfy the automation, scalability and robustness of today’s network security operations.”
Wedge hopes to fill the gap that it sees, and says it already has deployments in operator and enterprise environments. The company serves 15 million end-points with its security solutions, according to Zhang. Its Wedge Platform security services include anti-malware, anti-spam, firewalls, data loss prevention and mobile device security, among others.
Zhang said that in enterprise deployments, mobile devices have often had very limited or no protection. But as mobile becomes more important for enterprise communications and transactions, he said, there is more security risk and the need for a well-integrated security solution for mobile.
The promise of, and interest in, SDN and NFV has been one largely based on the search for cheaper, more flexible network components — and Wedge says it is delivering that, without the need to re-engineer the network. Its solution runs on “standard off-the-shelf hardware without reliance on any specialized hardware ASICs or accelerators,” according to the company, and incorporates auto-scaling of resources in order to prevent degradation of services.
