VMware partners with Carbon Black for security in virtual data centre
Fri 8 Dec 2017
VMware and Carbon Black have finalised a new security product that uses smart whitelisting for software-defined data centres.
The cloud-based product pulls together two ways of protecting a virtualized data centre. It uses its knowledge of how applications should behave, to ensure that behaviour is allowed. This capability is built into VMware’s existing product AppDefense.
Alongside this, it uses advanced and automated threat detection and prevention, through Carbon Black’s anti-virus tool, Cb Defense.
The combination of a product that is able to recognise the correct way an application should behave and one which can quickly and effectively shut down threats once it is not should, in theory, cover all bases within a software-defined data centre.
Cybersecurity has had to change to react to the way in which applications have changed. Applications now change regularly, and expected behaviour can be difficult for security products to follow. Legacy antivirus products worked by detecting bad or unexpected behaviour, but this is no longer suitable.
A security product that has a deep understanding of how applications should be behaving and can keep up with rapid changes in that behaviour is therefore more effective. By knowing which behaviour is expected, a product can allow this and nothing else.
VMware’s product AppDefense, released earlier this year, does this effectively. But Carbon Black believes that on occasions when a further level of defence is required, their product is best.
The release develops on Carbon Black’s Predictive Security Cloud (PSC), which is available to AppDefense customers, is the firm’s cloud-based endpoint security platform that it is designed to prevent attacks not yet seen. According to the company, this beats other security solutions which only react to attacks that have already begun.
Carbon Black believes that for VMware users, who are running millions of virtual machines around the world, this product represents an ‘unprecedented’ state of security. By using virtualization and streaming prevention, it states, the end result is ‘total endpoint security for the software-defined data centre.’
The product will be available from February next year.
