Announcing VMware NSX+: A Simpler Path to Consistent Multi-Cloud Networking

Deploying applications on multi-cloud infrastructure is challenging. VMware has long been committed to making multi-cloud networking and security simpler and more consistent through initiatives like Project Northstar which we announced at VMware Explore last year.

Today, we’re excited to continue our mission of simplifying the multi-cloud by introducing VMware NSX+, a new multi-cloud service offering for VMware NSX that makes it easier than ever to achieve a consistent and secure multi-cloud infrastructure for your applications.

Multi-cloud presents unique networking and security challenges

Securely deploying applications and infrastructure on-premises and across multiple clouds is complex

Multi-Cloud Challenges

Complex network design and operations: Each cloud can have its own set of tools and controls, slowing down network deployment and operations.
Limited visibility: Network operators often cannot achieve the end-to-end visibility and monitoring across clouds.
Secure Controls for Threat Detection: Lack of visibility into cross-cloud traffic increases the risk of lateral movement of undetected threats. Also, correlating threats across multiple clouds can be challenging because of the diversity of cloud environments.
Skills and resource gap: Public cloud providers have their own unique networking constructs and architectures, making it challenging to bridge the skills gap, and hire and train a team equipped to manage the complexity of multiple clouds.
Lack of cloud agility: Private and public cloud silos and manual network processes lead to app migrations to the cloud taking years instead of months.

Introducing VMware NSX+

VMware NSX+ is a cloud-delivered networking, security, and advanced load balancing as-a-service offering for NSX that allows networking, security, and operations teams to consume and operate NSX services from a single cloud console across private, hybrid, and public clouds. NSX+ optimizes business-critical network availability, performance, security, and cost. Customers will benefit from consistent policy management, unified visibility, network detection and response, advanced load balancing, and simplified cloud operations, helping them accelerate multi-cloud deployments at scale.

VMware NSX+ Services

NSX+ Policy Management: NSX+ Policy Management speeds up application and network infrastructure deployment across private and public clouds with a uniform policy framework, consistent networking and security controls, and automation delivered from a centralized cloud console. With consistent policy management, you can extend policies and rules across sites and use multi-tenancy and VPC constructs to deliver a self-service environment for application teams. You can also monitor network components such as Local NSX Managers and Edge nodes for availability, resources, and performance, deploy instant software updates and security patches, and access compatibility and version recommendations from the NSX+ dashboard.

NSX+ Intelligence: A modern zero-trust security architecture requires visibility and threat correlation across multiple clouds. NSX+ Intelligence simplifies security operations by providing visibility into application traffic within and across clouds without having to deploy any appliances or agents in your environment. With on-demand access to security policy management and analytics, you can visualize workloads in real-time and drill down into specific traffic flows to understand the nature of communication between workloads. NSX+ Intelligence also generates application group and security policy recommendations to simplify implementation of network segmentation and micro-segmentation.

NSX+ Network Detection and Response (NDR): The NSX+ Network Detection and Response (NDR) service provides scalable threat detection and response for workloads deployed in private and/or public clouds. The NDR correlation engine correlates events from various threat sources such as IDPS and Disributed Firewall and maps them into threat campaigns. This helps prevent alert overload and simplifies SOC monitoring processes across on-premises and cloud environments. This service provides simplified threat triage, scoping, and threat hunting aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

NSX+ Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) Cloud Service: VMware NSX+ Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Service that brings application awareness to VMware Cloud on AWS by mapping applications to the underlying infrastructure, including networks and servers. Cloud admins can readily access application health scores, end-to-end latency, and traffic patterns with an intuitive UI and deploy applications in minutes while eliminating contention between network, server, and application teams with pinpoint accuracy. The SaaS offering automatically simplifies day 0 to day 2 tasks, including controller installation, configuration, upgrades, disaster recovery, and autoscaling, so IT teams can focus on applications. The integrated solution simplifies compliance, governance, and policy management with a single vendor for purchase and support.

The Journey Starts Now

We’re excited about VMware NSX+ and the foundational improvements it can bring to your multi-cloud networking and security architecture. There are a variety of ways you can get started preparing for this powerful offering.

Check out all the sessions and content on VMware NSX+ at VMware Explore, which includes a ton of great, in-depth material from executives and product experts at VMware.