Phased Approach to Securing a Data Center

In the fight against relentless cyberattacks, organizations have long relied on traditional perimeter firewalls to protect sensitive workloads and information in the data center. But today, in the era of distributed applications and hybrid cloud environments, we know that perimeter defenses are not enough to stop cybercriminals.  

To improve security postures inside corporate networks — which means protecting against both bad actors who penetrate perimeter defenses and malicious insiders — organizations must monitor, detect, and block hostile east-west (internal) traffic using internal firewalls.  

To date, network and security professionals have generally viewed securing east-west traffic as too complex, expensive, and time-consuming for their brownfield, and even greenfield, data centers. At VMware, we agree with that perception: it’s certainly true for organizations trying to detect and prevent the lateral movement of attackers by employing traditional, appliance-based perimeter firewalls as internal firewalls.  

There’s a Better Way to Secure the Data Center 

Instead of awkwardly forcing appliance-based firewalls to serve as internal firewalls, organizations should employ a distributed, scale-out internal firewall specifically Continue reading

Financial Services Company Becomes More Secure and Agile

Flexible IT Infrastructure Required for Operation

Being #1 has its own kind of pressure. When you’re #2 in the market you have a clear goal: topple the #1. What’s the mindset of a market leader? Watch your back? Protect what you have? Ignore everything?

Harel lnsurance lnvestments & Financial Services is the leader of Israel’s insurance market. It has four big rivals competing for its business and must be conscious of outside disruptors turning the market on its head. An understandable strategy might be for Harel to sit tight and protect what it has.

Instead, Harel wants to transform its entire approach. It doesn’t just want to be big, it wants to be fast. It wants to succeed by being the first to launch new services, by exploring new forms of customer engagement, by being innovative.

Harel, formed through a series of mergers and acquisitions, wants to:

• Create an efficient, flexible IT infrastructure to support its entire operation
• Automate human process, shifting IT’s focus from maintenance to new service development
• Remove barriers to storage, performance and network, allowing developers to be faster to market with new services

IT will become the ‘silent leader’ of change throughout the business, proactively steering Continue reading