Current Trends and Future Opportunities for Security Appliances Industry

A virtual security application is a computer application that runs in virtual environments. It is called an appliance because it comes pre-installed with a hardened operating system and security application and runs on virtualized hardware. The hardware is virtualized using hypervisor technology from companies such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. The security application may vary depending on the network security provider.

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Some of the key players of Security Appliances Industry:

Bosch Sicherheitssysteme GmbH, Palo Alto Networks Inc., Check Point Software Technologies, Fortinet Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., Honeywell International Inc., NortonLifeLock Inc., Intel Corporation, Trend Micro Inc., Symantec Corporation

Some providers such as Reflex Systems have chosen to provide intrusion prevention technology as a virtualized appliance or as multifunctional server vulnerability protection from Blue Lane. The type of security technology does not play a role in defining a virtual security application and is more relevant to the levels of performance that can be achieved when deploying different types of security as a virtual security application. Further problems are the visibility of the hypervisor and the virtual network executed in it.

Traditionally, security appliances have been viewed as high performance products that may contain custom ASIC chips that, due to their dedicated hardware approach, enable higher levels of performance. Many vendors have begun to refer to pre-built operating systems with dedicated applications on dedicated server hardware from IBM, Dell and offshore brands as "appliances". The commonly used appliance terminology has strayed from its original roots. An administrator would expect any underlying Linux operating system to use a monolithic kernel because the hardware platform is likely static and vendor controlled.