VMworld 2019: A New Approach to Networking and Security
The current state of cybersecurity is fundamentally broken. Tom Corn, senior vice president and general manager of security products at VMware, made this assertion in a breakout session Monday at the VMworld 2019 conference in San Francisco.
His argument: Cybersecurity, while an area with high investment and rapid innovation, has remained a collection of bolted-on products that create silos and complexities for organizations.
Corn proposed VMware’s new security approach as a solution, sharing how the company intends to move the industry forward by no longer focusing on reengineering the attacks of yesterday.
“Security has remained reactive, and in our view, it needs to change to proactive,” said Corn. “Security needs to shift to understanding the behavior of the applications and the users so that it can understand attacks rather than look back at what has happened before.”
This analytical approach was primarily in reference to the company’s updates to AppDefense, VMware’s data center endpoint security product, and their recent acquisition of endpoint security leader Carbon Black. However, this sort of proactive plan to take security to the edge can be seen across many announcements coming from the conference this week.
VMware Announces Software-Defined Networking and Security Stack
VMware announced innovations in the areas of networking and security that support the company’s vision of the Virtual Cloud Network, which is now deployed by over 13,000 customers, including 88 Fortune 100 businesses and eight of the world's top 10 telecommunications companies. VMware’s announcements included:
- VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer: Previously known as Avi Networks Platform, the new NSX Advanced Load Balancer, with its modern, software-defined application delivery services, helps organizations prevail over the complexity and siloed nature of legacy systems. Using a centralized interface, users can dispatch the product’s intelligent web application firewall and software load balancer to any application on any cloud. Through the addition of advanced analytics and monitoring, the product ultimately offers customers a fast, scalable and overall more secure application experience.
- NSX Intelligence: This product is a “new distributed analytics engine built natively into NSX-T,” according to a VMware news release. Used hand in hand with VMware vRealize Network Insight, NSX Intelligence enhances network and security operations for the Virtual Cloud Network. These enhancements include reduced risk through the elimination of blind spots and deeper insight for customers into data center flow.
These solutions are collectively intended to help the company deliver a public cloud experience across any infrastructure. Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of networking and security business for VMware, shared in the news release that through these solutions, the company intends to deliver “consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security to apps, data and users wherever they reside.”
Dell Technologies Enhances Software-Defined Networking
It can be difficult for any modern organization to keep up with multicloud traffic demands, especially when it comes to legacy WANs. Dell Technologies unveiled a new SD-WAN solution Monday, co-developed with VMware, that uses cloud capabilities to help customers modernize and secure their networks from edge to core to cloud.
The Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution delivers modernized network operations, reduced WAN costs and holistic simplicity by combining VMware SD-WAN software by VeloCloud and Dell EMC support, supply chain and services. The solution has three main components — SD-WAN Edge powered by VMware, SD-WAN Orchestrator and SD-WAN Gateways — collectively enhancing the efficiency, reliability and security of networks.
"Dell EMC and VMware are rebuilding the network for the cloud era - with everything open, automated and software-defined," said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager of Dell EMC Networking & Solutions, in a Dell Technologies release. "New SD-WAN solutions powered by VMware … raise the stakes when it comes to network virtualization and security in today's highly-distributed software-defined enterprise. We're just getting started on our combined innovation."
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