Posted by Back in the day security inside a datacenter was a lot simpler. You had workloads running onprem and inside the network they were “secure” and you put a firewall on the parameter to keep threats out. However, with applications living everywhere from traditional infrastructure, private clouds, hybrid clouds, public clouds, and on the edge it has become a lot more complicated to protect your workloads. Long gone are the days when the network security battlegrounds used to be north-south. Now the new battle grounds have emerged and it is east-west.
Other VMworld 2020 announcements:
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-bringing-sase-to-sd-wan-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-vrealize-network-insight-vrni-vmworld-2020-announcements/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-nsx-t-advanced-threat-prevention-announcements-at-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/importance-of-vmware-nsx-t-in-the-modern-datacenter-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-cloud-on-aws-vmconaws-vmworld-2020-announcements/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-cloud-disaster-recovery-draas-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-vrealize-ai-cloud-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-vrealize-cloud-universal-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-cloud-on-dell-emc-vxrail-vmworld-2020/
With the rise of the branch users that need secure access to data in the cloud and back at the primary onprem datacenter is where you need to inject security the most. This traffic isn’t happening between north-south but it is happening at east-west.
The old school approach to addressing these concerns is bringing in appliances that have ceilings & constrants and hairpin all of your traffic through these devices before the traffic can be sent to it’s intended destination.
This model lacks scalability because to grow you have to bring in a new bigger beefer appliance. This can be a bottleneck to datacenter workload expansions.
Imagine a world where you could take the old firewall and IDS/IPS and push it down to each individual workload, essentially braking it up into hundreds to thousand of pieces of software to push out. That is the kind of scale and flexibility NSX-T can bring to your network security.
Having been a NSX-T customer in a global company I can confirm cost savings will go down with the software defined model over the hardware model.
The NSX-T portfolio of offerings and services have evolved since it’s initial release.
Step 1 was micro-segmentation Step 2 IDS/IPS with 3.0 with a deeper inspection of traffic
Step 3 – lastline acquisition – bring in network sandbox, network analysis – complete single platform for advanced security inside the data and if anything gets beyond the parameter NSX-T can handle.
With NSX intelligence it checks compliance, and makes recommendations for staying compliant with your security compliance.
The new TAU is a mixture of PhD security specialists merged with machine learning algorithms to better help secure your environments.
This slide says it all. Machine learning combined with world class threat research team at VMware brings a huge benefit to VMware customers.
Summary:
As threats and attack surfaces grow VMware is uniquely position to help customers with these threats as they continue to expand out to the edge. Merging micro-segmentation, IDS/IPS, and network sandbox, network analysis into a single platform is allowing VMware to harden your environment and shrink the east-west attack surfaces. I’m eager to see how VMware continues to add to the NSX-T platform and the new partners they will add to their growing partner eco-system. As always, I hope y’all found this helpful.
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