SSL Visibility Appliance

Symantec recently released its first on-premises virtual appliance (VA) for dedicated SSL/TLS inspection. SSL Visibility (SSLV) has long provided customers a purpose-built hardware solution developed to enable inspection by a wide variety of security tools. Now, customers who prefer to deploy VAs can add SSLV to their existing on-premises or private cloud infrastructure and gain the same benefits as traditional SSLV hardware users.

The new SSLV Virtual Appliance is a licensable software solution that can be installed and deployed on a server running VMware vSphere hypervisor.  Customers can consolidate servers by co-existing with other virtual machines on a single hardware platform, including the Secure Web Gateway Virtual Appliance.  Having the SSLV Virtual Appliance provide SSL decryption enables other virtual machines to provide branch office services (such as Domain Controller, print, DNS, and DHCP), as well as any VMware-certified software applications. 

As a virtual appliance, SSLV delivers the clear text streams of all TLS flows, including TLS 1.3, and supports HTTPS, SPDY, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, FTP, and other protocols that use SSL/TLS encryption. The decrypted traffic flow can be sent to an enterprise’s existing private cloud security infrastructure to detect and protect against advanced threats hidden in encrypted traffic.

Now, customers who maintain a private cloud infrastructure of ProxySG or ASG virtual appliances can also enjoy the same offload capabilities previously limited to Symantec hardware appliance deployments.  This affords them greater flexibility and resource efficiency, along with OpEx cost benefits.

Symantec is leading the way in both Encrypted Traffic Management and cloud-delivered Network Security. The introduction of SSLV as a VA is a critical step in their convergence. To learn more about SSLV, please visit our product page.