Juniper buys Altor to boost virtualisation security

Juniper Networks has announced an agreement to purchase security firm Altor Networks in a deal worth around $95m (£60m).

The acquisition will allow Juniper, which has previously invested venture funds in Altor, to offer a single set of management tools and policies to protect virtualised and physical enterprise systems.

The company is hoping that the combined offerings will protect all datacentre traffic, including communications between virtualised and physical servers and virtual machines.

"Today we join forces with Juniper, which shares a common vision for securing datacentres and the cloud, and together we look forward to extending our leadership in the virtual machine security market," said Amir Ben-Efraim, chief executive and co-founder of Altor Networks.

"We are excited about the opportunity to leverage Juniper's world-class organisation and market-leading products to deliver tightly integrated, feature-rich security solutions to customers."

Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald suggested that the merger makes sense, as it provides Juniper with a virtualised security platform that can compete with larger enterprise security firms.

"Longer term, security vendors should provide security services that can be delivered via physical appliances, virtual appliances, cloud-based services or a combination of all three," said MacDonald in a blog post.

"Organisations cannot use 100 per cent virtualised security controls any more than they can use 100 per cent physically delivered security controls."