Embracing Heterogeneity

To say that modern-day IT infrastructure is diverse is an understatement. Today’s enterprise datacenter is a hodgepodge of legacy systems, software-defined on-premises infrastructure and a mix of clouds. In fact, organizations have an average of 4.8 clouds each, according to the RightScale® 2018 State of the Cloud Report. And according to Forrester¹, 36% of businesses use 6 clouds or more!

If not handled properly, this level of heterogeneity can introduce management complexity and security challenges. To help organizations avoid these issues, infrastructure vendors like VMware® evolve their solutions to enable single-pane-of glass management and orchestration across multi-vendor on-premises and cloud infrastructure. With the introduction of VMware NSX-T Data Center, the company aims to “deliver consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security for applications and data across any environment.” In its latest release, NSX-T Data Center 2.4, the network virtualization and security platform adds, among others, Guest Introspection capabilities to enable agentless security for server and VDI workloads running in the heterogeneous datacenter.

As a leader in cloud-workload security for multi-cloud and multi-hypervisor environments and a long-time VMware collaborator, Bitdefender is honored to be a VMware Design Partner for NSX-T Guest Introspection. We are particularly proud that Bitdefender GravityZone Security for Virtualized Environments is on track to become the first cloud-workload protection platform to deliver agentless security with NSX-T Data Center.

With a security architecture that is hypervisor- and cloud-agnostic by design, we have been helping customers across the globe gain the visibility and control they need to protect their diverse datacenter environments consistently and efficiently. Now, we are excited to offer our next-generation workload security to organizations adopting VMware NSX-T Data Center. Our HyperDetect tunable machine learning, an industry-first in agentless security, lets VMware NSX customers protect their software-defined datacenter from a broad spectrum of threats with speed, low administrative overhead and minimal system impact. This powerful pre-execution defense layer features machine-learning models and advanced heuristics trained to spot infections and malware-obfuscation techniques.

With Bitdefender HyperDetect, administrators can adjust aggressiveness levels in detecting different threats to suit the context and risk profile of their organization. This lets customers detect high-probability, high-impact attacks while minimizing false positives on lower-risk threats. For example, to prevent ransomware from disrupting datacenter operations, administrators can set the HyperDetect level for ransomware to “Aggressive.” If grayware poses a lower risk, the organization can set HyperDetect to “Permissive” to minimize the number of alerts for grayware. Once a threat is detected, HyperDetect can take policy-driven action, such as denying file execution or deleting a file, or simply alert and report.

We will be showcasing GravityZone Security for Virtualized Environments with VMware NSX-T at RSA Conference 2019 in San Francisco, CA on March 4-7. So come check out next-generation agentless security with tunable machine learning in the Bitdefender booth #2051 in the South Expo hall. And be sure to ask our experts about an extended free-trial offer for VMware NSX customers. See you at RSA!

P.S. If you are not coming to RSA, take a peek at the press release, demo video and solution brief.