VMware wants its data center customers to know it takes security seriously. Today, it’s announcing a new security product, co-developed with Carbon Black.
Both VMware and Carbon Black will sell the cloud-based security software, which automates threat detection and remediation.
VMware launched its long-awaited and first security product, AppDefense, three months ago. At the time, it also partnered with a number of security companies including Carbon Black to integrate its new product with their security offerings.
The new joint product will be available by early February 2018. It combines AppDefense with Carbon Black’s Cb Defense to protect applications inside the data center.
AppDefense protects applications running on vSphere-based virtualized and cloud environments by monitoring them against their intended state. It leverages the hypervisor to monitor runtime behavior and uses machine learning to detect attempts to manipulate applications. It then uses vSphere and NSX to automate and orchestrate response to attacks.
Cb Defense provides endpoint security by applying behavioral approaches to detect threats. It uses streaming prevention to monitor for malicious behavior on a machine to protect against malware and non-malware based attacks.
Tom Barsi, vice president, business development at Carbon Black, described it as a “new approach for data center security. From a security operations perspective, it finally opens up the black box of the hypervisor and gives them access into the actual virtualization layer. You don’t need any other endpoint security when you use this joint product.”
What makes the product unique is the context and built-in automation capabilities that AppDefense provides, coupled with Cb Defense’s endpoint protection against attacks, said Chris Corde, senior director of product marketing for the networking and security business unit at VMware.
“We’re taking all the context that AppDefense knows about a particular machine and handing it off to Cb Defense,” Corde said. “Any AppDefense alerts will also be fed into Cb Defense, and the same is true on the flip side — we’ll be getting all of their alerts.”
The product also gives both companies access to new markets. Historically, buyers haven’t flocked to VMware for its security offerings. Although network security has become a popular use case for the company’s NSX technology, its original purpose was network virtualization. AppDefense is VMware’s first pure-security product.
Meanwhile, Carbon Black has a decade’s worth of experience — and customers — in the security sector. But it doesn’t have VMware’s strong software-defined data center customer base.
“We get access to the VMware base and VMware gets access to the security buyers,” Barsi said.