Astaro protects corporate networks against Internet threats such as system intruders, viruses, spam, and spyware. The company was founded in 2000 and is dual headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Boston, Massachusetts.

The company's Unified Threat Management product line Astaro Security Gateway is available as software and hardware appliance, and protects over 30,000 corporate networks today.

Astaro is working closely with the open source community to develop its products, although its business model is to sell software licenses and subscriptions. With over 100 employees, Astaro is one of the larger, second-generation, open-source companies worldwide. Other so called second-generation, open-source companies include MySQL AB and JBoss.

In 2005, Astaro coined the term Network Assurance to describe the benefit of safe and reliable networks.

Open source projects that are sponsored or supported by Astaro include: Netfilter, ClamAV, Openswan, strongSwan, and OpenVPN. Astaro has sponsored the TWiT Network's Security Now! podcast with Steve Gibson since 6 April, 2006 (episode #34).