Partners in the Tufin Open Platform (TOP) initiative include Blue Coat, Check Point, Cisco, F5 and Fortinet, all of whom are supporting the API from a software and appliance perspective.

The initiative will allow software and hardware from a TOP-compliant vendor to intelligently communicate its status with a variety of other information across a network environment.

According to David Aminzade, Tufin's UK director, the API will allow companies to configure their appliances and IT security systems to communicate with each other across the local area network.

"This makes the task of implementing security policies and management of the IT resource a lot easier, as well as allowing IT managers to better manage day-to-day operations of today's complex, intertwined, dynamic networks," he told Infosecurity.

With the TOP API, he says, IT managers will be able to support security lifecycle management using building blocks from several vendors.

We are at the stage with IT security technology, he says, where everyone realises that customers now have products from multiple vendors, and, as a result, IT managers need to integrate their products a lot more closely.

Tufin says that TOP is designed to deliver centralised policy change analysis and tracking, configuration change and compliance monitoring, along with performance optimisation and auditing across a wide variety of security and networking devices.

To support the initiative, the company has released a software development kit for third-party vendors to integrate their networked devices with Tufin's SecureTrack and SecureChange Workflow technology.

http://www.tufin.com/TOP