Watching paint dry minute by minute: VMware's recent security partner announcements

After VMware launched vShield Endpoint (agentless antivirus) in vSphere 4.1 there has not been too many third party vendors to integrate with. The security vendors have needed some time to implement proper support for this new functionality and lately we've seen several vendors announcing support for both vShield Endpoint and VMsafe. I guess it's a sign that virtualization is now commodity and that customers demand better solutions than the traditional ones. The functionality you get through virtualization is still better than physical so why not use a suited security solution?

Some of the latest announcements involve these:
http://www.bitdefender.com/news/bitdefender-integrates-with-vmware-vshield-5-endpoint-2379.html
http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/product/2012/Kaspersky_Lab_announces_its_security_solution_for_virtual_environments
Symantec and VMware Deliver Extensive Protection for Virtual and Cloud Environments

VMware also recently released a statement with comments from many of it's security partners showing that there is a lot going on in the security eco system:
http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-rsa-partner-momentum-2-29-12.html

I guess we have exciting times ahead.

Lately I have been working with Trend Micro Deep Security, a product that does a lot of different things in order to detect, protect, monitor and report on security issues. I will try to provide a more detailed posting on this topic later.

The topic of the discussion on episode 79 of the Virtualization Security Roundtable is "RSAC/Bitdefender" and covers many of these same things.

Monday, March 12, 2012