The acquisition builds on Juniper's existing technology partnership with Altor and will extend Juniper's leadership in security for both the enterprise and service provider virtualization markets. As organizations rely more on virtual servers for critical applications, concern around server security in the cloud has increased. Altor has developed some of the industry's most advanced capabilities to address this challenge, including a high-performance hypervisor-based firewall, on-board intrusion detection, complete network visibility and monitoring and comprehensive reporting for compliance. Altor's solution enables security visibility, compliance and control over the entire virtual machine infrastructure, giving security teams' visibility to understand the applications, services and traffic being sent between virtual machines.

Virtualization technology enables multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical host, with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that hardware across multiple environments. An increasing number of enterprises have virtualization technology deployed in some portion of their data center, with that number expected to increase, according to a recent study by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).1

"Juniper is excited to acquire one of the industry's leading virtualization security vendors and the extremely talented team that built it," said Mark Bauhaus, executive vice president and general manager, Service Layer Technologies at Juniper Networks. "This acquisition will extend our leadership in data center 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."

"Altor has led the virtualization security market in innovation, defense-in-depth and performance," said Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO and co-founder of Altor Networks. "Today, we join forces with Juniper, which shares a common vision for securing data centers and the cloud, and together we look forward to extending our leadership in the VM security market. We are excited about the opportunity to leverage Juniper's world-class organization and market-leading products to deliver tightly integrated, feature-rich security solutions to customers."

Altor Networks was founded in 2007 by security and networking experts from some of the industry's leading vendors. In early 2010, Juniper Networks made a venture investment in the company.