Kuala Lumpur – February 26, 2019 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), a leading innovator in enterprise software, today announced new innovations to advance the company’s strategy to make security intrinsic to the digital enterprise. Intrinsic security makes protecting critical applications and data more automated, proactive and pervasive across the entire distributed enterprise. Today’s announcements, made at RSA Conference 2020, include:
New VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation - which will enable customers to replace legacy security solutions and deliver unified protection across private and public clouds. A survey commissioned by VMware and conducted by Forrester Consulting shows that 75 percent of respondents depend on perimeter firewalls, however East-West security controls need to be different than those for traditional perimeter (North-South) security as 73 percent of respondents believe their existing East-West traffic is not adequately protected(1).
VMware is specifically addressing the internal data center security challenge with the new VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation, which will include VMware Carbon Black technology, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Web Application Firewall capabilities and VMware NSX Distributed IDS/IPS. All three will tightly integrate into VMware vSphere, the industry standard for data center workloads, enabling world-class security to follow workloads wherever they go through their entire life.
VMware Carbon Black technology protects workloads with Real-time Workload Audit/Remediation, Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) and Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR). VMware Carbon Black will be tightly integrated with VMware vSphere to yield an “agentless” solution, eliminating the need to insert antivirus and other agents. This also means, unlike agent-based solutions, the hypervisor will be able to detect if an attacker attempts to gain root access and tamper with the VMware Carbon Black technology — all from a separate trust domain.
The web server is the “front door” of the data center, often customers using hardware-based solutions with fixed capacity will turn off security filtering under heavy loads, leaving critical servers vulnerable. The unique, scale-out software architecture of the NSX Web Application Firewall helps confirm web servers have enough computation capacity for maximum security filtering even under peak loads. It then uses rich understanding of applications, automated learning, and app-specific rules to provide strong security with lower false positives.
Behind the web tier, micro-segmentation and in-band East-West firewalling helps prevent lateral movement of attackers. The VMware NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, a new capability of the VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall, will provide intrusion detection on the many different services that make up an application making it easier to get deep visibility. The distributed architecture of NSX Distributed IDS/IPS will enable advanced filtering to be applied to every hop of the application, significantly reducing the blind spots created when using traditional perimeter security products. Policies will be automatically generated and enforced on an application-specific basis, thereby lowering false positives.
For more information on VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation read this blog.
Advancements to the VMware Carbon Black Cloud - which including automated correlation with the MITRE ATT&CK framework and upcoming prevention coverage for Linux machines. VMware has introduced automated correlation with MITRE ATT&CK framework Technique IDs (TIDs)—a list of common tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)—built into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud. Using MITRE’s ATT&CK framework, customers can begin searching for specific TTPs based on MITRE ATT&CK techniques within the VMware Carbon Black Cloud to discover potential threats and identify areas of improvement in their security posture.
VMware Carbon Black will be adding malware prevention capabilities for Linux machines. This innovation will empower customers to migrate away from other endpoint prevention solutions specific to Linux and consolidate their security programs. This addition to the VMware Carbon Black Cloud platform means customers will have the option for comprehensive security coverage across all major operating systems (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
For more information on the latest VMware Carbon Black Cloud enhancements read this blog.
New VMware Secure State auto-remediation capabilities to automate actions across cloud environments and proactively reduce risk - VMware Secure State is adding a new, flexible remediation framework to help customers automate actions across multicloud environments. Currently in Beta(2), this solution is designed to help cloud security teams collaborate with DevOps teams and gain trust as they gradually scale best practices. The service provides pre-defined, out of the box actions or ability to create new, custom actions as code
Security teams will also get comprehensive capabilities for managing overall cloud risk. To address existing misconfigurations, they can either bulk remediate violations themselves or publish actions to delegate decisions to DevOps teams. In order to prevent new misconfigurations, they can build guardrails that auto-remediate violations at real-time speed. With an extensible, policy as code approach, users can programmatically execute all remediations as code using API and integrate them within the CI/CD pipeline. No matter how actions are triggered, customers maintain centralized visibility into remediation progress and changes to cloud resources.
For more information about VMware Secure State auto-remediation, read this blog.
