Altor Networks, a 14-month-old start-up backed by $6 million in funding from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, says the kind of security used on physical machines flat-out doesn’t work in the virtual world and that you’ve got to think of virtualized machines as a network unto itself. Altor’s thinking that way and claims to be able to make a virtual environment more secure than a physical one by putting the security at the network level, specifically on the virtual (software) switch. That way, it says, you can lock down policies for each virtual machine with maybe 8%-10% latency, which it claims is a fraction of the performance costs you pay if you try to apply physical security to VMs, and would break if you tried to make it dynamic. With traditional physical security, if you were trying to communicate, Altor says, between the front-end and back-end you would either have to break security or sacrifice some of the virtualization. Altor, which was co-founded by the former head of business development at Check Point Software Amir Ben-Efraim, has started with a Virtual Network Security Analyzer that passively plugs into the switch and shows you what’s going on inside the so-called virtual network that most people don’t even know is there, it says.