Data center networking company Big Switch Networks is announcing a new security platform today, BigSecure, enabling new capabilities for its Big Monitoring Fabric.

BigSecure is an architecture that contains other Big Switch products such as Big Monitoring Fabric and components such as open networking switches and detection tools. In a nutshell, it allows security and monitoring tools, enabled by Big Monitoring Fabric, to protect the underlying network.

Before this announcement, Big Monitoring Fabric allowed for multiple switches to be controlled and monitored by one big switch, hence the company's name. Hardware switches could be purchased from companies like Dell and then monitored and controlled by Big Switch’s software.

Now, Big Monitoring Fabric can also monitor workloads in public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as virtual machines (VMs), and containers, says Big Switch CEO Doug Murray. All of this is monitored and controlled by the BigSecure platform.

All of this is made possible by optimizing traffic flows to go from the network to security tools, Murray claims. The tools themselves aren’t in the fabric itself, but act as a connective tissue that connects them to switches, VMs, and containers. Big Switch uses monitoring and security tools from companies like Symantec, FireEye, Riverbed, and A10 Networks.

Once the BigSecure architecture is in place, monitoring and security tools identify the attack and interact with the Big Monitoring Fabric controller so that incoming traffic can be redirected and load-balanced across a range of network functions virtualization (NFV)-based security and monitoring tools. The tools are able to scan network traffic for packet flows that contain attack signatures and then sends the remaining traffic to other security tools for continuous monitoring.

“Allowing for better optimization of security tools is a big part of this announcement,” Murray says. “Customers are looking for a way to creatively package security solutions together as one.”