The network security challenges that organisations face and the need to implement deep, layered, security strategies pushes many IT security budgets beyond their limits. This means that organisations may have difficulty scaling infrastructure and operations sufficiently to address network security developments.

Inkra is a company that provides some thought leadership in this area. Their approach is to consolidate the multitude of dedicated network appliances-such as firewalls, VPNs, intrusion detection systems, and load balancers that provide security and ensure business continuity into one integrated and simplified architecture that Inkra call the Virtual Service Architecture (VSA).

The VSA is delivered through Inkra's Virtual Service Switch. A VSS virtualizes and integrates network services commonly deployed on appliances such as firewall, VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, and load balancing. The strength of a VSS is that it enables multiple instances of these services to be instantiated on a single hardware platform at the same time.

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