Secure Passage, creating a community based on open standards

One of the areas in security that I follow is the security device management space. There are two great companies that lead the way and neither one is one of the “usual suspects”. One is Tuffin Technologies and the other is Secure Passage. Both are led by great teams and both have been making great strides in their evolving product line ups. Starting as “enterprise firewall managers”, security device management is branching out into managing all sorts of different types of security and network devices.

Secure Passage just entered into a great deal with F5 to manage F5 infrastructure. Though best known for their load balancing, F5 has migrated to offering more security, especially to their data center customer base.  Having the deep bi-directional integration with the Secure Passage management platform is a boon to any security and network managers life.

When I call it the Secure Passage platform, I mean it. Today, Secure Passage launched their Firemon Nexus community . I spoke to Jody Brazil, CTO and President of Secure Passage about this yesterday.

A few years back it became evident to Jody that his customers wanted to get at all of the valuable information that Secure Passage was gathering as part of its management function. Opening up the data to the customers in ways and forms they wanted led to a re-engineering of the Firemon product. Jody’s team developed and published open, standard API’s, that let their customers easily access Firemon data in a variety of ways.

Everything from simple scripts to database queries, and more could be accomplished using these APIs. What the customers and Firemon were developing were called extensions.  The idea behind the extensions is that they are open and free. 

Now with the Firemon Nexus community, Jody and team have set up a clearing house and repository for Firemon extensions that all can share. It really is a great idea to extend the functionality of the product and create a community of Firemon users. You can access the Nexus community at http://nexus.securepassage.com

Borrowing from the open source community model to leverage their existing business and customers is just one more example of how companies like Secure Passage are continuing to push the envelope.