VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance is Now Available to VCF Customers

Following the announcement at VMware Explore earlier this year, we are now making a new Advanced Service generally available for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) customers. Starting November 3rd, VCF customers can purchase VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance, an offering engineered to elevate security policy compliance, cyber risk management and platform security for organizations who operate in heavily regulated environments, or who simply want more robust functionality to support their critical business needs.

In this modern threat landscape, security, compliance and resilience have become more tightly linked than ever before. An organization’s ability to prevent, detect, mitigate and recover from cyberattacks and non-compliance drifts can determine not just its success, but its survival. However, solutions available today fail to deliver a comprehensive end-to-end approach that enables successful outcomes across this spectrum of use cases. This generates operational inefficiencies, siloed visibility, as well as increased risk of data loss and non-compliance. 

VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance combines the power of proven VMware technologies with new capabilities to holistically address pressing challenges organizations face as regulatory compliance requirements become increasingly stringent and cyberattacks more sophisticated. 

The offering builds on a robust set of compliance management, infrastructure availability and security capabilities that are already built into our core platform and available to customers with core VCF entitlements. Customers can unlock elevated platform-level value for VCF environments leveraging the following innovations:

Compliance Enforcement at Scale

Siloed policy management hinders drift detection and leads to reactive vs. proactive responses which could put organizations at risk. Powered by VMware Salt, VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance offers centralized configuration management that allows IT teams to provision, configure, deploy, manage, and monitor nodes efficiently at massive scale. With event-driven automation, they can quickly execute commands on individual or groups of virtual machines (VMs) to make sure all nodes operate consistently in the desired state and enforce compliant software configurations throughout the infrastructure. In addition, VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance customers benefit from compliance and vulnerability management to enhance their overall security posture. This enables automated remediation of critical security threats in both on-premises and cloud environments, which minimizes risks of breaches and non-compliance across IT systems.

Figure 1: Centralized monitoring and remediation of compliance policies in VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance powered by VMware Salt

Automated Cyber and Data Recovery

Cyber and disaster recovery are an essential last line of defense to prevent data loss and document compliant data protection practices required by regulatory entities. VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance includes fully-orchestrated disaster recovery across VCF on-premises sites to streamline data recovery, efficiently manage infrastructure and optimize use of human resources. To support the needs of different application tiers, Infrastructure teams can set up custom replication schedules and recovery scripts with RPOs as low as 1-minute thanks to enhanced vSphere replication. The entire recovery process is automated end-to-end and can be enabled at a scale of thousands of VMs with a single click.

Cyber recovery across on-premises VCF sites is currently available as a VMware Validated Solution and will become tightly integrated into VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance in the near future, with built-in validation tools to identify and help clean modern ransomware strains from restore point candidates, embedded VM network isolation to prevent lateral movement, and guided workflow automation to speed up the recovery process. 

Figure 2: Cyber recovery to an on-premises VCF isolated clean room (currently available as a VMware Validated Solution)

Enhanced Platform Security and Incident Response

Lack of advanced monitoring can hinder the ability of IT and Security teams to identify and remediate incidents before they cause widespread damage. With VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance, customers are entitled to custom security assessment reports to enhance system visibility, prevent disruptions and improve overall service quality. The comprehensive reports deliver actionable insights to optimize system reliability, efficiency and operational health and cover the following areas: 

• VMware Security Vulnerabilities to identify potential risks and provide remediation guidance;
• upgrade recommendations to maintain optimal performance and compatibility of applications; 
• certificate expiration notifications to enable uninterrupted operations; and
• firmware and driver validation through cross-referencing with compatibility guides. 

To accelerate incident response and remediation, these reports are complemented with enhanced support for Severity 2 issues, now available 7 days a week during customer business hours.

Figure 3: Custom security assessment reports delivered by VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance

To enable streamlined, more secure operations for modern applications, VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance also supports ultra-small Ubuntu container images. By only deploying the resources needed to run these applications, IT developers can reduce the attack surface, accelerate workload deployments and minimize time to audit-readiness. Enterprise-grade support for the full VCF stack that includes Ubuntu OS and chiseled containers is also available as part of the offering.

VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance is designed to solve modern challenges that have yet to be addressed. It integrates compliance, risk management and resilience operations to enable more secure, efficient and continuous operations. It removes the need for IT teams to deploy and manually stitch together multiple point solutions from different vendors, enables consolidated visibility into the health of IT environments, and accelerated incident response. 
Want to learn more about VMware Advanced Cyber Compliance? Visit our webpage or contact your Sales representative.