When it comes to cybersecurity, you can never have a product that’s too robust. Which is why the announcement of Virtual Software Systems' new venture looks so promising. The engineering team at the newly unveiled Waltham-based firm is taking the knowledge and skills they developed previously at Marathon Technologies, to develop a unique and innovative way to neutralize cyberattacks after a breach.
The goal: To dramatically enhance the reliability and security of enterprise data and applications, in both cloud and traditional environments.
It sounds like a lofty objective, but the veterans at the company—which goes by VS2, for short— say they have more than a dozen computer design patents under their belts, and in fact developed a number of the foundational technologies involved in modern computing.
Now, VS2 hopes to “provide a missing piece of the puzzle” in today’s security infrastructure — the gap between perimeter solutions, such as firewalls and anti-virus software, and interior defense solutions, such as encryption.
Richard Fiorentino, co-founder and CTO of VS2, previously co-founded the venture-backed software provider Marathon Technologies of Littleton, which was acquired by Maynard-based Stratus Technologies in 2012. In an email, Fiorentino said that he’s building on earlier efforts, including at Marathon, which developed the world's first software-based approached to preventing application failure (aka, fault tolerance).
Now, the aim is to devise even more expandable fault-tolerant technology.
“Since we work within the core server, we get one chance to make the system right if we have to remove an exploited virtual machine from the configuration," Fiorentino said. "Fault tolerance allows us to add data continuity and enforced application determinism to the exploit technology we have developed."
He added: "We think security means total system protection, including hardware and software bugs, and heisen-bugs. That’s what we’ve done, and our team’s experience in fault tolerance and kernel-level software and hardware systems design is absolutely a key to what we’ve created here at VS2.”
Fiorentino was also a key member of the team that created Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX systems and workstations, and holds six U.S. patents in parallel computer architectures, fault-tolerant computing and software.
VS2 is currently self-funded, and its CEO is John Conway, previously a founding partner of Gemini Consulting.
Tech editor Kyle Alspach contributed to this report. Image of a woman with a hologram around her head via Shutterstock.
