Next-Level Lateral Security for Your Private Cloud

Cyber attacks are growing in frequency and complexity. And at an average cost of $4.35M¹, data breaches are no joke. With Generative AI, this threat will grow even further—equipping even an unsophisticated attacker with the means to become a sophisticated hacker.

Reality is, you can’t get away with just protecting your perimeter anymore. Today, the most common type of attack vectors—lateral movement, vulnerability exploits and zero day attacks — are all matters of lateral security. And with the majority of your traffic going east-west, protecting the inside of your network is beyond critical.

Traditional security solutions aren’t enough when it comes to lateral security: implemented with multiple appliances, they lead to traffic hairpinning, create bottlenecks, are cost-prohibitive, and only protect a subset of workloads. To make matters worse, they’re blind to VM-to-VM traffic, since traditional methods of using network taps only see traffic between physical hosts. And you can’t protect what you can’t see. 

To protect the inside of your private cloud, you need a comprehensive lateral security solution that gives you complete visibility and security.

VMware’s Lateral Security answers that call; it is distributed, built into the hypervisor, and scales seamlessly to meet your evolving Continue reading

Network, Security, and Cloud – 3 Key Takeaways from VMware Explore 2023

In August, I attended VMware Explore Las Vegas. I always enjoy interacting with our customers and partners, and this year was no exception. The show was fantastic, energy was high, and excitement was rampant with a wide range of innovations that brought enhanced simplicity, security and agility for our customer IT environments.

Explore 2023 was a whirlwind of activity. I spoke to hundreds of attendees throughout my four days! Now that I’m back, I’ve had some time to reflect on all things Explore. Here are my top observations from the week:

1. VMware has simplified the adoption of the cloud, strengthening the private cloud stack and expanding our multi-cloud offering

It was gratifying to hear customer commentary on the richness of the VMware private cloud stack and the innovations we’ve brought about to create consistency across a multi-cloud deployment. The broad array of innovations across multiple business units reflected the deep    customer focus we have coupled with reducing the friction for consumption.That’s

This has made it simpler for customers to engage with VMware solutions than dealing with 4-5 other vendors to stitch together their stack for the cloud, which leads to complexity and cost escalations and prolongs proof of Continue reading

Delivering a True Cloud Operating Model with Cloud Speed: NSX+ Innovates for Multi-Cloud

Companies in every geography and industry have had the fortune, in recent years, to choose from a variety of remarkable cloud platforms to run their applications—including on-prem private cloud, VMware clouds, and native public clouds. In fact, 83% of organizations surveyed by VMware have their application workloads distributed across multiple cloud environments1.  

But every major technological advancement creates new challenges and opportunities. IT leaders have been telling me that they need a true cloud operating model across multi-cloud to address two key challenges: 

• First, they’re stuck in partial automation purgatory. It takes their siloed teams many IT tickets to set up security, networking, and load-balancing services to deploy an application. This isn’t just operationally inefficient, it breeds friction between the infrastructure and application owners. 

• Second, operating across multi-cloud environments is complicated. Teams lack consistent visibility, policy, and operations across cloud deployments. This causes change management nightmares, security blind spots, and unprecedented delays in troubleshooting issues. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, I’m proud to share that VMware is taking a significant step towards making a single cloud operating model for managing and securing networks a reality through our launch of NSX+. Our Continue reading

Announcing Networking and Advanced Security Enhancement in NSX 4.0.1.1

We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of VMware NSX 4.0.1.1, another exciting release with updates in networking, security, and operations for private, public, and multi-clouds.

With this release, VMware NSX customers will be able to leverage accelerated NSX networking and security performance, enhanced network observability, and new network monitoring and troubleshooting features for increased flexibility.

NSX 4.0.1.1 will also deliver enhanced threat detection and prevention capabilities, helping customers bolster network defenses to block advanced threats from moving laterally across multi-cloud environments.

Read on to get the details on our latest NSX release.

Distributed Malware Prevention

The NSX Distributed Firewall has added malware detection and prevention support for Linux guest endpoints (VMs). Linux has become the most common operating system across multi-cloud environments, powering more than 78% of the most popular websites. With the recent emergence of more Linux-specific threats, and current malware countermeasures being mostly focused on addressing Windows-based threats, there is an imperative to address the specific security needs of Linux machines. Adding Linux to our prevention solution enables the NSX Distributed Firewall to provide more effective prevention coverage and fewer false positives across multi-cloud environments.

In addition, we expanded the Continue reading

Announcing Project Northstar: SaaS delivered Multi-Cloud Networking and Security

Multi-cloud architectures are becoming an increasingly central part of enterprise strategies delivering applications reliably. In a VMware Digital Momentum Study of enterprise technology decision-makers, nearly 73% report they are standardizing on multi-cloud foundations to operate applications and infrastructure¹.

Multi-cloud infrastructure offers many benefits – such as the ability to scale quickly and increase reliability. By extension, multi-cloud deployments can help businesses:

• Innovate and transform the customer experience
• Scale and grow the business
• Empower employee engagement and productivity

Yet, from an operational and technology perspective the multi-cloud presents a major challenge: Complexity. Rapid innovation and growth require the ability to deploy and manage workloads in any public cloud while providing the required service availability and scale. However, managing workloads and infrastructure on multiple clouds at once significantly increases the complexity of the network architecture connecting these applications and clouds. It also requires businesses to deploy complex security rules to protect lateral network traffic while having to rely on limited workload mobility and visibility and threat detection capabilities that do not scale.

Successfully adopting a multi-cloud infrastructure requires a means of taming the complexity that is inherent to multi-cloud.

Introducing Project Northstar

We are introducing Project Northstar, a new technology preview, Continue reading

Announcing NSX-T 3.2: Innovations in Multi-Cloud Security, Networking, and Operations 

We’re excited to announce VMware NSX-T 3.2, one of the largest NSX releases so far. NSX-T 3.2 includes key innovations across multi-cloud security, scale-out networking for containers, VMs, and physical workloads. It also delivers simplified operations that help enterprises achieve a one-click, public cloud experience wherever their workloads are deployed. 

Strong Multi-Cloud Security 

NSX-T 3.2 provides strong, multi-cloud, easy-to-operationalize network defenses that secure application traffic within and across clouds. NSX-T 3.2 goes a step further in making it easy to enable Zero Trust application access across multi-cloud environments — enabling customers to secure traffic across applications and individual workloads with security controls that are consistent, automated, attached to the workload, and elastic in scale. 

Tapless Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)

Network traffic analysis (NTA) and sandboxing solutions are integrated directly into the NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW). NSX eliminates traffic hairpins by distributing NTA as a service within the hypervisor. Combined with distributed IDS/IPS capabilities, security teams can now virtualize the entire security stack and eliminate blind spots while allowing security policies and controls to follow workflows throughout their lifecycle, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. 

Gateway Firewall

The enhanced gateway firewall serves as a software-based gateway with L2-L7 controls — including URL filtering and advanced threat prevention with malware analysis and sandboxing. This extends centralized security controls to physical workloads, the data center perimeter, and the public cloud edge — ensuring consistent security controls across both east-west and north-south application traffic Continue reading

Simplify the Modern Network with VMware NSX-T 3.1

Continuing our commitment to helping organizations around the world deliver a public cloud experience in the data center through VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network, we’re excited to announce the general availability of VMware NSX-TTM 3.1. This latest release of our full stack Layer 2 – 7 networking and security platform delivers capabilities that allow you to build modern networks at cloud scale while simplifying operations and strengthening security for east-west traffic inside the data center.  

As we continue to adapt to new realities, organizations need to build modern networks that can deliver any application, to any user, anywhere at any time, over any infrastructure — all while ensuring performance and connectivity objectives are met. And they need to do this at public cloud scale. NSX-T 3.1 gives organizations a way to simplify modern networks and replace legacy appliances that congest data center traffic. The Virtual Cloud Network powered by NSX-T enables you to achieve a stronger security posture and run virtual and containerized workloads anywhere. 

Continue reading

VMware Delivers NSX-T 3.0 with Innovations in Cloud, Security, Containers, and Operations

We are excited to announce the general availability of VMware NSX-T 3.0, a major release of our full stack Layer 2 to Layer 7 networking platform that offers virtual networking, security, load balancing, visibility, and analytics in a single platform. NSX-T 3.0 includes key innovations across cloud-scale networking, security, containers, and operations that help enterprises achieve one-click public cloud experience wherever their workloads are deployed. As enterprises adopt cloud, containers, and new applications, IT teams are managing more heterogenous and distributed environments that need to be secured, automated, and monitored. The need to run and manage workloads on all types of infrastructure, VMs, containers, bare metal across both private and public clouds, is greater than ever. Enterprises need end-to-end software-defined solutions to fully automate, connect, and protect all their workloads. 

As a key component of VMware Virtual Cloud Network, VMware NSX-T 3.0 includes groundbreaking innovations that make it easier to replace legacy appliances that congest data center traffic, achieve stronger security posture, and run virtual Continue reading

NSX-T 2.5 – A New Marker on the Innovation Timeline

NSX-T has seen great success in the market for multi-platform network and security use-cases, including automation, multi-cloud adoption, and containers as customers move through the digital transformation initiative. NSX-T is the industry’s only network and security platform delivering a wide range of L2-L7 services, built from the ground up for workloads running on all types of infrastructure – virtual machines, containers, physical servers and both private and public clouds.

This year, we are hyper-focused on innovation, and in bringing transformative capabilities to market through NSX-T, which is the foundation for both our VMware NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud offerings. This release of NSX-T further strengthens our intrinsic security capabilities architected directly into networks and public and private cloud workloads that applications and data live on, reducing the attack surface. This version also keeps up the accelerated pace of innovation we are delivering on for scalability, cloud-native support, and operational simplicity which can accelerate customers’ adoption of a Virtual Cloud Network architecture.

Key Focus Areas in NSX-T 2.5

Launching NSX Intelligence – A Native, Distributed Analytics Engine

Analytics-based policy recommendation and compliance, streamlined security operations

NSX Intelligence is a distributed analytics engine that provides continuous data-center wide visibility Continue reading