Written in collaboration with Devyani Pisolkar, NSX Product Marketing
It’s been a banner year for VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. This service offering allows customers to easily pair their own Microsoft Azure capacity with the intuitive Horizon Cloud control to quickly deliver virtual desktops and apps to end-users in a matter of hours. We are seeing a lot of momentum from customers as they adopt Horizon Cloud to deliver virtual desktops and application from their own Microsoft Azure infrastructure to any device, anywhere.
This year alone we added a number of key capabilities to Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure:
- Windows 10 VDI
- Support for Microsoft Azure Government
- Support for VMware Identity Manager Cloud
- New VM types for VDI and RDS
- Power management
- Disk encryption
- Support for RADIUS 2FA
The VMware Horizon Cloud team continues to build more capabilities to make it even easier to deploy, manage, and utilize virtual desktops in the cloud. This month, we are back with a new release of VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure with exciting new features. This release brings cloud monitoring support in Australia to support data sovereignty requirements in the region, Windows Server 2019 support for RDS, as well as, support for VMware NSX Cloud. We are particularly excited about the integration with NSX Cloud and the added security it brings to our customers – so let’s dive a little deeper on this topic.
Support for NSX Cloud
In this release, we worked closely with the VMware NSX team to deliver an integrated solution that enables organizations to further secure their virtual desktops. As we know, more and more cyber-attacks start with phishing attacks on end users, using end user devices as the entry point of the attack. End-user security starts with securing virtual desktop environments. NSX Cloud helps secure virtual desktops and applications deployed by Horizon Cloud and provides a more robust security posture to the customer environment in Microsoft Azure.
What is NSX Cloud?
VMware NSX Cloud delivers networking and security for applications running natively in public cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. NSX Cloud is an extension of VMware’s NSX Data Center technology that brings the NSX networking and security framework to cloud-native applications.
VMware NSX Cloud for Horizon Cloud on Azure brings enhanced security to virtual desktop environments, with policies that dynamically follow end users across infrastructure, devices, and locations.
Key Benefits of NSX Cloud for Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure Environments
Secure Virtual Desktops Using Micro-segmentation
NSX Cloud protects virtual desktops and apps hosted in Microsoft Azure data centers by securing traffic between each VDI system (east-west traffic) and providing isolation for desktop pools. The NSX Cloud micro-segmentation policy can control traffic between desktops within Azure VNET/s as well as traffic destined to on-premises applications in a hybrid deployment.
Automated Policy That Dynamically Follows End Users and Desktops
Administrators can set policies centrally that dynamically adapt to the end user’s computing environment, with network security services that map to the user based on role, logical grouping, desktop operating system, and more—independent of the underlying network infrastructure. Policies follow the virtual desktops wherever they are moved across the cloud-hosted environment.
We are extremely excited to have support for NSX Cloud for Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure and look forward to enabling customers with this powerful security solution in their cloud environments.
