REFLEX SECURITY

Founded: 2000; incorporated in June 2003

Headquarters: Atlanta, USA

Management: Hezi Moore, CTO and founder, is considered a pioneer in network intrusion prevention. Previously, he co-founded and served as president of MicroTech Systems, a firm specializing in network design and configuration point-of-sale systems.

Funding: Seed funding in 2000; Series A funding in July 2003; US$12 million in Series B funding led by Spencer Trask Ventures and RFT Investment in September 2006, for a total of US$25 million in funding to date.

How the company got its start: Launched by Trellis Network Security in August 2000; in June 2003, Series A investors created Reflex Security, focused on appliance-based gateway security. By early 2007, the company decided to try its hand at addressing security challenges in virtual-server environments. "Visibility is a challenge at the virtual layer, lack of control due to server mobility is an issue, and it is necessary to have a security tool inside the virtual environment," Moore says.

What the company offers: Virtual Security Appliance (VSA) software, which installs inside a virtual environment to provide network security managers with discovery, event management, antimalware, firewall, network-access-control, intrusion-detection-system and intrusion-prevention-system capabilities. Reflex couples the virtual-security tools with its traditional IDS and IPS capabilities and provides event management and device configuration as well. "We can see who accessed what in terms of virtual resources and perform full network-discovery and provide visibility into the virtual environment," Moore says.

Why it's worth watching: "The products are designed to provide traffic scanning at the egress point for the VM environment in the form of a security switch or an in-line IDS or IPS appliance sitting in front of the virtualized server hardware," Hochmuth writes in a Yankee Group virtualization-security report. "Traffic that gets through this initial layer of security would then hit another layer inside the virtualized server environment, where VSA can police traffic sent among VMs inside the box and to connections beyond the virtualized device."

How the company got its name: Reflex Security is meant to convey the automated nature of its technology, in that securing the environment would be a natural reflex to a potential threat or risk.

Who's using the product: Oxford University, among others.