VMware spotlights lateral security as key to cyber resiliency – News

No one is safe from ransomware attacks, which is why VMware by Broadcom has developed VMware Cloud Foundation with lateral security in mind.

VCF is VMware’s private cloud platform for managing enterprise infrastructure, and marks a shift in strategy from traditional disaster recovery to cyber resilience. The company embeds most security functions into the platform itself, simplifying businesses’ cybersecurity operations.

“[Companies] try to buy all these different boxes for firewalls, for intrusion detection, for network analysis,” said Sazzala Reddy (pictured), chief technology officer, cloud storage and data, at VMware by Broadcom. “The challenge is that every traffic which comes out of the VM must go through these boxes. It basically makes the whole thing slow and very complex to manage … how we thought about this is that instead of buying all these different systems, what if we bring all these functions, all these intrusion detection and network analysis traffic directly to where the VMs are and run it as part of your infrastructure?”

Reddy spok with theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand for an exclusive interview on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what cyber resiliency means and the newest updates to the VMware Cloud Foundation. (* Disclosure below.)

Addressing lateral security on VCF

Many companies are focused on tackling breaches from the outside, but according to Reddy, lateral security, as in addressing attacks that move across VMware’s network, is just as important. As a cloud infrastructure vendor, VMware has designed VCF to both be resilient to attacks and to recover quickly when they occur.

“Broadly, we have done a few things to actually integrate a lot of these [cyber resiliency] components built in into the infrastructure like VCF,” Reddy said. “One is that how do we prevent and detect and prevent and look at the analysis of the data and see what’s stopped before it gets too wide. And, secondly, is that, OK, let’s say it did get infiltrated. How do we recover fast from these things?”

As enterprise platforms have evolved, so have ransomware attacks. Every business will get hit sooner or later, so VMware also offers VMware Live Recovery, which stores a series of high-frequency snapshots in one place for analysis and recovery.

“These days, ransomware is no longer just file by signature. It’s mostly fileless,” Reddy explained. “It requires behavioral analysis, next-gen antivirus things. You need networking isolation because you don’t want things to escape you. This is a challenge like a DIY kit for customers. So, we took all these ideas and put it into one tool, into one part of the VCF stack.”

Last but not least, any business hoping to stay resilient to cyberattacks needs a clean room — a place where the company under attack can launch infected virtual machines and prevent the breach from spreading laterally. VCF offers clean rooms through its virtual private clouds whose networks can be controlled in the wake of a breach.

“You need a clean room,” Reddy said. “We offer you a choice, the clean room … you can build it in your data center. We have that option if you want to, or also we have an option to do it dynamically, use cloud resources when you have a problem. You don’t have to pay all the time; you can just pay when you need to.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Sazzala Reddy:

(* Disclosure: VMware by Broadcom sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware by Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.) 

Photo: News