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Ornis acts To Stop Application Vulnerabilities Threatening 500 Data Center Servers

Ornis, One of France's Leading Service Providers, Standardizes On Blue Lane's Inline Patch Proxy To Stop Application Vulnerabilities Threatening 500 Data Center Servers.

Solution Vital to Business Uptime of Data Center and its 1,000 Corporate Customers

Blue Lane™ Technologies Inc. today announced that Ornis, one of France's leading ASPs, is the first French Hosting Provider to deploy the Blue Lane PatchPoint® system as a standard inline patch proxy solution for the increasing number of major vendor application vulnerabilities threatening the security and uptime of the 500 business critical servers within the data center and hence the businesses of its customers' themselves.

As a leading ASP in France providing network and IT facilities management solutions to more than 1,000 corporate customers and coverage extending to more than 4,000 websites, Ornis' challenge is to ensure that all its servers are always available. As the major application providers - Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, etc. - continue to step up the number and frequency of major new security patches and hence critical application vulnerability announcements, Ornis is continuously faced with the "patch now or patch later" dilemma, each with its own set of risks and consequences. If Ornis immediately deploys the vendor patches without testing, the ASP risks potential disruption to the servers and downtime not only of their business but also to their customers. If Ornis waits until the patches can be tested, the company risks the threat of an attack or exploit upon the application vulnerability which could also bring the businesses down. Until the Blue Lane PatchPoint system, there were no alternatives.

"When dealing with servers that must always remain available and for which no pre-production test environment exists, how do you keep those servers updated with the latest security patches? That's been the dilemma faced by Ornis, which specializes in hosting online business applications. Our business is to industrialize corporate services within an ASP model," said Jean-Marie Labeyrie, COO of Ornis.

There are over 500 servers that host its clients' critical applications: "Server maintenance is highly critical, especially when it comes to applying security patches," said Sylvain Mouly, Ornis's Assistant CTO. "However, we're hosting very critical applications, such as those used for Marcel Mérieux Laboratories. Such services cannot be interrupted or suffer from disturbances resulting from an unsuitable patch.

"For a long time, none of the many patch management solutions tested by Ornis successfully addressed the real problem: ensuring the servers' total availability, even when an unstable security update is installed or if a patch requires the system to be restarted.

"When Cortina, a Blue Lane Integration Partner in France, first came to me with the PatchPoint solution, I was skeptical since it seemed miraculous," Mouly said. A proof-of-concept was quickly implemented on a few unpatched servers.

"We then tried to exploit known vulnerabilities on 'protected' servers, but the PatchPoint patch proxy prevented us from doing so, just as if the patch had been installed within the machine," he added. Convinced, the company decided to deploy two PatchPoint G/450 Gateway appliances in front of all its server farms.

"It was easy to install the patch proxy, since it detected the machines, their operating systems, and their applications almost automatically," Mouly said. Today, Ornis is thrilled about its choice: "Now, instead of applying security patches in a hurry, we can just let the patch proxies protect the machines until the next scheduled maintenance. Blue Lane allows us to reintegrate security patches seamlessly as part of a normal maintenance strategy," Sylvain Mouly said.

This approach is reinforced by Cortina. "Our clients are up against two enemies: threats and time. One of the key benefits of the PatchPoint solution is that operating teams can regain time that has slipped away from them in the fight against these threats," Pascal Orset, cofounder of Cortina, concluded.

About Ornis
One of France's leading ASPs, Ornis provides network and IT facilities management solutions to more than 1,000 corporate customers and coverage extending to more than 4000 websites.

For more information
Contact Jean-Marie Labeyrie
Tel : +33 (0)1 56 37 73 73
Email: labeyrie@ornis.com
Web site : www.ornis.com

About Blue Lane Technologies Inc.
Blue Lane provides the industry's first inline patch proxy for enterprise servers that fixes application-specific vulnerabilities at the root cause by checking for the same conditions and applying the same corrective action as the software vendor security patch. Solving the dilemma of "patch now or patch later," the Blue Lane PatchPoint System instantly secures critical applications and preserves the uptime of the business while eliminating the cost and risks associated with unscheduled patching. Founded in 2002, Blue Lane is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, contact the company at www.bluelane.com.