Several years ago, the CEO of a Fortune 100 company remarked: “If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.”

Today, these words are more true than ever—but so is the reality that the digital transformation in business has also given rise to significant changes across the IT landscape and, in turn, significant new challenges for IT security.

As people, devices, and objects become more connected, protecting all these connections and environments has become a top priority for many IT organizations. At the same time, it’s also become one of their biggest challenges. Securing each and every interaction between users, applications, and data is no easy feat—especially when you consider that securing these interactions needs to be done across environments that are constantly changing and increasingly dynamic.

So how do you mitigate risk in a world where IT complexity and “anytime, anywhere” digital interactions are growing exponentially? For organizations that are embracing cloud and virtualized environments, three common-sense steps—enabled by a ubiquitous software layer across the application infrastructure and endpoints that exists independently of the underlying physical infrastructure—are proving to be key for providing the visibility and control needed to maximize security across modern IT environments.

  • Secure the application infrastructure

While traditional data center security can provide adequate protection at the perimeter, it is not designed to provide sufficient visibility and control inside the data center. Virtualizing the application infrastructure, and compartmentalizing applications via network micro-segmentation, can help provide the protection needed against today’s increasingly sophisticated attacks.

  • Secure identity and endpoints

As mobility, BYOD, and IoT initiatives proliferate, so too does the complexity of managing an ever-widening variety of devices. Virtualization can help verify user identity and device posture, providing true visibility and control that extend into the data center or cloud, where the application infrastructure resides.

  • Streamline compliance

Managing risk and maintaining compliance are major challenges, made even more difficult as organizations make the transition from on-premises data centers to cloud. Virtualization helps enable a more holistic approach to meeting compliance demands by providing an ideal location to implement controls and gain visibility.

Of course, this is just a brief overview of how a purposeful software layer that spans from infrastructure to endpoint can help transform IT security for today’s organizations. For a more detailed discussion, please read the VMware solution overview entitled, “Three Key Steps to Transforming IT Security.”

Learn more about Transform Security here.

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