Meet the VMware Service-defined Firewall: A new approach to firewalling

VMware has had front row seats to the digital transformation that has touched virtually every organization. We’ve been there (and helped drive!) the journey from monolithic applications hosted on a single server, to distributed apps running in VMs, to further decentralization in the form of cloud-native apps composed of microservices. Now, we’re watching the proliferation of public clouds, the up and coming space of serverless and the adoption of functions as a service as ways to build and deploy applications faster than ever.

It’s this vantage point that also gives us clear line of sight to one of the biggest cyber security challenges that modern enterprises face: as their applications become more distributed, an organization’s attack surface significantly increases. Despite all of the advancements and innovation in the way applications are built, we have not seen the same rate of progress with respect to the way applications are secured. Adopting a zero-trust network security model in an enterprise environment remains incredibly hard to achieve. How do you know what security policies to create? How do you enforce those policies consistently across on-premises physical and virtual environments, let alone the public cloud? How do you enforce them across different Continue reading

Take Application Security to the Next Level – VMware and Carbon Black team up

Perhaps you’ve already begun to secure virtualized applications by rolling out micro-segmentation with NSX, but segmentation of the network is only the beginning to embracing least privilege in your environment.

VMware has teamed up with Carbon Black to go beyond network protection and change the way your data center endpoints themselves are protected. By leveraging the unique properties of virtualization and the hypervisor, along with next-generation detection and response, VMware and Carbon Black are able to shrink your environment’s attack surface and respond to detected threats with precision and speed.

Learn more here, and come see the solution in action at the Cloud Force Security road show (coming to a city near you)!

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VMware AppDefense & CB Defense Demo

As you may have heard, VMware and Carbon Black have come together to deliver best-in-class security architected for today’s data centers.

In this demo, you’ll see an example of how CB Defense and VMware AppDefense combine to enforce known good application behavior and detect threats using industry leading detection and response technology.

For this demo, we’ll show how an advanced security breach can come in under the guise of an innocuous application (Powershell) and often go undetected.  We’ll walk through the steps that security teams can now take to respond and address the attack all in one application.

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Introducing VMware AppDefense – Expanding beyond micro-segmentation to threat detection and response

Hopefully, you have heard the news today! We couldn’t be more excited to announce the general availability of VMware AppDefense, our new security solution. AppDefense bolsters the micro-segmentations threat prevention capabilities delivered by NSX with data center endpoint threat detection and response. It’s no secret that organizations are spending more money than ever on security. It’s also no surprise that the only thing outpacing security spend are the losses due to security breaches. At VMware, we believe the struggle organizations face in gaining the upper-hand in this battle is due to a foundational architectural gap that creates misalignment between the infrastructure where security is applied and the applications that security is designed to protect.

NSX was the first step toward re-aligning network security policy with applications by leveraging the virtualization layer to enable micro-segmentation, as well as enhance the posture of other security solutions through integrations and features like service insertion and guest introspection. But applications are made up of both networks and data center endpoints like VMs. AppDefense is the other half of the puzzle. Whereas NSX prevents threats from moving freely throughout the network, AppDefense detects anything that does make it to an endpoint and can automatically Continue reading

Application Rule Manager (ARM) Practical Implementation – Healthcare

This post originally appears as part of a series of VMware NSX in Healthcare blogs on Geoff Wilmington’s blog, vWilmo. To read more about VMware NSX and its applications in healthcare, check out Geoff’s blog series.

Originally this series on Micro-segmentation was only going to cover Log Insight, vRealize Network Insight (vRNI), and VMware NSX.  With the release of VMware NSX 6.3, there is a new toolset within NSX that can be leveraged for quick micro-segmentation planning The Application Rule Manager (ARM) within NSX, provides a new way to help create security rulesets quickly for new or existing applications on a bigger scale than Log Insight, but smaller scale than vRNI.   With that in mind, we’re going to take the previous post using Log Insight, and perform the same procedures with ARM in NSX to create our rulesets using the same basic methodologies.

The Application Rule Manager in VMware NSX leverages real-time flow information to discover the communications both in and out, and between an application workload so a security model can be built around the application.  ARM can monitor up to 30 VMs in one session and have 5 sessions running at a time.  Continue reading

Securing Electronic Healthcare Records: The New Frontier

We didn’t find any medical sutures or gauze at HIMSS last week, but there sure was a lot of talk about the future of healthcare IT security. The status of electronic health record (EHR) security as a hot topic is clear, too: patient information is increasingly being moved to electronic form in order for healthcare organizations to increase clinician efficiency and remain compliant, but as we’ve seen in other industries, electronic information is difficult to keep safe. EHR data contains our medical identities, complete with medical histories, address histories, extended family names and histories, and more, making it a prime target for bad actors attempting to steal personal information.

What is the current threat landscape for this EHR data? A recent Accenture survey found approximately 26 percent of Americans have been impacted by a healthcare data breach. To combat the rise in healthcare cyber attacks, health providers are looking to IT for infrastructure and application support that prioritizes data security while continuing to maximize clinician workflow efficiency and drive better patient outcomes.

That’s where VMware NSX comes in. NSX empowers healthcare organizations to secure the infrastructure that EHR systems and other critical care applications live on. This ensures the healthcare Continue reading