FireEye Inc. announced its entry into the Network Access Control (NAC) market with patent-pending virtual machine technology to provide an accurate and easy-to-deploy internal network security solution. Founded by the former CTO of Sun Microsystems' N1 products, Ashar Aziz, and headed by security industry veterans from Cisco, McAfee and Symantec, FireEye has closed a Series A round of funding of $6.45 million led by Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. The company's first product, expected in the summer of 2006, leverages virtual machines within a network appliance to examine the impact of suspicious network traffic in an instrumented virtual environment.

"FireEye has developed a genuinely transformational technology that plays into an enormous market opportunity," said Promod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "Strong positive reaction from customers, coupled with increasing business pressure to protect against zero-day attacks, worms and network-borne malware, were key factors in driving the current funding round."

According to a recent report by Infonetics Research, a leading international market research and consulting firm, Network Access Control (NAC) is the "Holy Grail" of network security. Infonetics projects the NAC market will grow from $323 million in 2005 to $3.9 billion in 2008, driven primarily by increasing desire to protect against internal malware infections.

"The ability to monitor for anomalous traffic and the ability to quickly contain this traffic are important aspects of a post-connect network access control process," said Lawrence Orans, security analyst for Gartner. "The challenge is finding the right match for your environment with a solution that provides high levels of coverage without excessive quarantines or false positives."

Security products have historically been difficult to deploy, configure and manage. FireEye technology allows IT administrators to protect internal network access by securing against infected machines that spread zero-day attacks, worms and network-borne malware, without the challenges of unnecessary quarantines, software agents or complex policy administration.

FireEye technology goes beyond traditional indicators of infection, such as policy violations or behavioral deviations, to precisely identify attacks and eliminate the need to resolve false positives and prevent non-infected machines from being unnecessarily quarantined. With capabilities that are refined from a technological and management perspective, FireEye will delivers operational efficiency and management that might just set the standard for network access control.

"Industry analysts have projected the network access control market to grow to nearly four billion dollars in just under two years; however, today's NAC solutions are time-consuming and painful for organizations to deploy," said Gaurav Garg, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "With an effective, simple-to-deploy NAC solution, FireEye will fulfill the critical customer requirement for 'effortless NAC' and is well-positioned to garner marketshare in this still burgeoning industry."

Ashar Aziz, founder and CEO of FireEye, has received more than 25 patents over his career as a pioneer in the area of network security and infrastructure virtualization technology. Prior to FireEye, Aziz founded Terraspring, a company focused on data center automation and virtualization. Terraspring was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002. Aziz joined Sun Microsystems upon this acquisition as CTO of the company's N1 program. Supporting Aziz is a team of seasoned security industry veterans from Cisco, McAfee and Symantec, providing leadership in the areas of sales, marketing, engineering and operations.

"We are transforming the NAC game with breakthrough technology that increases network security, while freeing valuable IT resources and ensuring business continuity," said Aziz. "FireEye's first-of-its-kind solution to a very challenging network security problem will prove invaluable for companies seeking an 'always on' network for validated enterprise users."

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