ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,218,956, issued on Feb. 4, was assigned to Musarubra US LLC (San Jose, Calif.).

"Providing a virtual security appliance architecture to a virtual cloud infrastructure" was invented by Geoffrey Howard Cooper (Palo Alto, Calif.), Manuel Nedbal (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Hemang Satish Nadkarni (Cupertino, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method in an embodiment includes detecting a change for a virtual machine in a virtual server of a virtual network infrastructure, determining whether a virtual security appliance is configured in the virtual server, and sending a request to create the virtual security appliance in the virtual server. ...