Certes Networks has inked deals with Ciena, Cyan, Overture, RAD, and Luxoft to include its newly released CryptoFlow Cloud virtual encryptor in the five vendors' network function virtualization (NFV) ecosystems.

A sixth vendor partner remained unnamed at press time.

Announced earlier this month, CryptoFlow Cloud can deploy to hypervisors as a virtualized encryptor, or run as a virtual machine in the cloud or on a third-party device. The software creates "tunnel-less" VPNs by encrypting network traffic according to policy set by an administrator.

Smart policy implementation is "one of the big challenging issue of deploying encryption in the modern environment," says Adam Boone, chief marketing officer at Pittsburgh-based Certes.

"If you try and deploy it on everything, you're going to bring the infrastructure to its knees," Boone adds. "You need to encrypt the traffic which is affected by compliance rules or general good practice, and you need to leave other traffic in the clear."

A rash of major data breaches has left many enterprise security professionals rethinking the perimeter approach to security, which guards access at the edge of the network, but may leave traffic vulnerable to interception once the perimeter is breached. Traffic encryptors are one proposed solution.

"We're really seeing the tip of the iceberg with some of these breaches, it's safe to say," says Boone.

"We're going to see it get worse before it gets better."