Los Alamos National Laboratory Wins National Cybersecurity Innovation Award for Leap Forward in Cloud Security

Infrastructure on Demand - Award-Winning Secure Cloud Initiatives in Government

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The SANS Institute announced today that Los Alamos National Laboratory has won the 2011 U.S. National Cybersecurity Innovation Award for their innovative use of vShield and other defense tools that represent a breakthrough model for securing virtual computing and private cloud deployments.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111031/DC97163)

As federal agencies and commercial organizations move quickly to take advantage of cloud computing, they are also concerned about the increasing risk of cyber-attacks. A large fraction of these cloud computing initiatives rely on VMware to manage the virtual computers which are deployed in the cloud environment. VMware has been pushing for its customers to shift toward the vShield architecture which offers ways to use built-in application firewalls through what's known as vShield Zones, or to use vShield App, the hypervisor-based application-aware firewall for the virtual data center. The vShield App uses application-aware firewalling installed on the vSphere host to control and monitor all network traffic on the host.

Los Alamos National Laboratory was able to use vShield to create the Infrastructure on Demand cloud platform featuring inventive cloud security and automation architecture. They have deployed a private cloud that allows their organization to offer infrastructure as a service to Los Alamos researchers. Los Alamos has cut a 30-day server provisioning process down to 30 minutes, and in its first six months, the service was used to provision more than 700 virtual machines.

Key features of the Infrastructure on Demand program includes:

• Automated provisioning of workloads into secure enterprise enclaves
• Mapping physical security into a virtual security model using VMware vShield
• Employing automated remediation features to offline non-compliant workloads
• Extension of a private cloud security framework

Los Alamos National Laboratory wins the 2011 National Cybersecurity Innovation Award for improving the security of cloud computing and virtual systems.

About the National Cybersecurity Innovation Awards
The National Cybersecurity Innovation Awards recognize developments undertaken by companies and government agencies who have developed and deployed innovative processes or technologies which are innovative in that it has not been deployed effectively before, can show a significant impact on reducing cyber risk, can be scaled quickly to serve large numbers of people, and should be adopted quickly by many other organizations. Nominations included most senior government officials involved with Cybersecurity as well as those from major Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs).  Corporations and individuals, including SANS instructors also nominated innovations and each nomination was tested by the SANS Institute research department. More than 50 nominations were received and 14 were selected.

About SANS Institute
(www.sans.org) The SANS Institute was established in 1989 as a cooperative research and education organization. SANS is the most trusted and by far the largest source for information security training and security certification in the world.  In addition to world-class training, SANS offers certification via the ANSI accredited GIAC security certification program. SANS offers a myriad of free resources to the Infosec community including consensus projects, research reports, newsletters, and it operates the Internet's early warning system - the Internet Storm Center.  At the heart of SANS are the many security practitioners in varied global organizations from corporations to universities working together to help the entire information security community.

SOURCE SANS Institute