The industry better watch out because AFORE Solutions (News - Alert) is making its mark in the virtualization space…  and in a big way, according to company officials.

In addition to nabbing the title of Gold Winner in the “Security and Compliance for Virtualization” category in the Best of VMworld 2011 Awards, AFORE recently announced the availability of a comprehensive security platform for the hybrid public and private cloud and the fact that it has joined the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA).

“In the last few weeks we burst on the scene a little bit more,” Jonathan Reeves, chairman and chief strategy officer for AFORE, told TMCnet at Interop (News - Alert) in New York City a few weeks ago. “… It’s been a really exciting last few weeks.”

AFORE, a company that is about seven years old, has been directing its attention to the virtualization and security spaces over the past three years. Most recently, the company is honing its efforts into the cloud security arena.

AFORE is known for its CloudLink offering, a trusted multi-tenancy (TMT) on-ramp to the cloud solution for both private and public cloud computing. CloudLink addresses three fundamental issues: security, performance and manageability and provides secure, optimized and managed communications between the enterprise and a cloud infrastructure, according to company officials.

“The idea is very simple,” Reeves said of CloudLink. “When multiple enterprises deploy their workload to the cloud, security and compliance become a big concern and it’s actually limiting the growth of the cloud today.”

“The cloud we feel has been a moderate success… because in real workload deployments it’s been delayed,” he added. “We set out to change that.”

Some of the key capabilities of CloudLink are that it boasts: end-to-end encryption of data in motion and data at rest for multi-tenant private and public clouds; encrypts all layer 2 (Ethernet) and layer 3 (IP) cloud communications; encrypts all data written onto the cloud storage subsystem; offers integration with Key Management Systems; monitors network SLAs and provides powerful fault isolation and troubleshooting tools; and provides per VM (virtual machine) traffic flow management capability, among other things.

Over the past few years, AFORE has seen a rise in interest surrounding the cloud from the financial and healthcare sectors, particularly since CloudLink allows doctors to use HIPPA compliant cloud capabilities.

Moreover, AFORE has witnessed an increased demand for private as opposed to public clouds.

“We originally thought public cloud would be primary use case, but the more we talked to folks at VMworld and systems integrator we realized there was a huge private cloud market,” Reeves said, noting that the other user case that works well is hybrid clouds.

Recently, AFORE announced the availability of a comprehensive security platform for the hybrid public and private cloud. AFORE’s seamless integration of CloudLink with VMware vCloud Connector will enable secure and monitored deployment of user applications from an enterprise to the public cloud, according to company officials. Specific features include point and click deployment, advanced SLA monitoring and Trust Watch, a real time security feature which provides continuous cloud security monitoring.

When asked about how AFORE distinguishes itself in the marketplace, Reeves said, “There is nobody doing what we are doing.”

“I think what most people have looked at is the fact that virus scanning and traditional security needed to be applied to the cloud but this is a different type of security,” he added.