Enterprises have begun adopting network virtualization for their IT infrastructure. According to a 2016 survey conducted by Accenture, 95 percent of small, medium, and large enterprises believe “network services will be virtualized.” Meanwhile, 25 percent of those who have adopted network virtualization have already seen cost reductions.
Why has network virtualization suddenly become the hot topic for organizations? A lot of the attention is due to the benefits that enterprises are seeing with network virtualization. Network virtualization delivers flexibility and agility, whether it’s to create a brand new (virtual) network, deploy applications or recover from hardware failure.
Security gaps in virtualization
We all know that cybercriminals are an agile, resilient, and increasingly well-resourced bunch. What this means is that they have been able to take advantage of the gaps that exist in many poorly-secured virtual environments to attack VMs and steal the organizational crown jewels.
In this context, traditional perimeter approaches to security are woefully outdated. For one thing, they allow inter-VM attacks. This tactic is favored by targeted attackers who typically infiltrate one virtual machine and then move laterally inside a data center to others until they find what they’re looking for, often barely stopped by any internal security controls.
Additionally, manual security configuration and patching remains one of the biggest areas of exposure for corporations as hackers are quick to exploit any holes they can find. And the dynamic nature of today’s data centers makes keeping up with basic security even more difficult as workloads are spun up and down and security policies have to be moved or reconfigured with the workloads.
Right tools for the right job
The VMware NSX networking and security platform combined with Trend Micro Deep Security builds on security in the Software-Defined Data Center to deliver a new level of data center security. The integration of Trend Micro Deep Security with NSX extends Trend Micro’s security services platform including anti-malware, firewall, intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS), web application protection, and integrity monitoring to the software-defined data center, enabling customers to leverage combined strengths for superior security and automation.
The key benefits of this integrated solution from Trend Micro and VMware include:
SECURITY – Providing elastic protection and scalability
The joint solution extends micro-segmentation—isolation of virtual clusters of workloads, even to the individual VM level, via distributed firewalling made possible by NSX. Deep Security extends micro segmentation via multiple security controls including IDS/IPS, anti-malware, virtual patching, URL filtering, file integrity monitoring, and log inspection. This means not only can the workloads be locked down, but they can be locked down multiple ways from a single platform, achieving a layered security approach that’s flexible depending on the needs of a given workload. This approach reduces the attack surface within the data center vs. perimeter security.
SPEED AND AGILITY – Automated deployment and provisioning
Deep Security has long offered network and endpoint introspection through vSphere with the ability to easily provision existing and new virtual machines (VMs). New integration capabilities delivered through NSX automation and Service Composer will further streamline the provisioning and deployment processes, making insertion, orchestration, and scaling of Deep Security significantly faster and easier across your data center.
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY – Automating workflow across protection layers
Through the use of a new common NSX tagging and orchestration framework, Deep Security services can be inserted as part of an automated, defined workflow for each security group, which is configured in NSX. The user can then decide to create an automated remediation process for each workload or group. This could be used to automate real-time remediation and incident response during attacks. The degree of automation reduces risk of human error in the configuration process and prevents proliferation of threats that do appear in the data center by isolating them and removing them once detected.
Next-gen security framework
With thousands of successful customer deployments worldwide, Trend Micro Deep Security has proven it improves security, manageability, scalability, and VM density. Trend Micro has received numerous accolades and recognition for virtualization security, including IDC’s #1 ranking in market share for server security (which includes virtualization and cloud security) since 2009.
The VMware NSX platform represents the latest step forward, demonstrating VMware and Trend Micro’s commitment to design the ideal next-gen security framework for today’s virtualized and cloud environments.
Join us at vForum 2017 happening across Asia, including Singapore (14 November), Indonesia and Malaysia (21 November) and the Philippines (28 November). For inquiries or to learn more about Trend Micro, send us an email at vmware@trendmicro.com Trend Micro will talk about securing your virtual environments at vForum 2017 in Asia-Pacific this month. Drop by our booth to learn how Trend Micro technologies can secure potential blind spots in virtualization. We hope you will also attend our vForum sessions “Automated Security for the Real-time Enterprise with VMware NSX and Trend Micro Deep Security,” wherein we discuss how building-in security automation with VMware NSX and Trend Micro Deep Security provides visibility, assesses risk, and applies the right protection.
