Clark County Embraces Intrinsic Security with VMware NSX Data Center

Allen Tyson is a Senior Network Analyst at Clark County, located in the State of Nevada. Clark County encompasses the City of Las Vegas, and sees 47 million visitors each year. With roughly 10,000 employees and 38 departments, Allen has a large network to maintain.

Alex Berger, Networking and Security Product Marketing Manager, spoke with Allen about software-defined networking (SDN), and what led Clark County to choosing VMware NSX Data Center.

The Power of Social Media Communities

When a forward-thinking Deputy Chief Information Officer began talking about SDN, Allen did his due diligence to decide on the best option for Clark County. He took to social media to determine whether that choice would be NSX Data Center or Cisco ACI.

“First thing I did was I got on Twitter,” Allen explains. “It seemed like NSX was capable of doing a little bit more [than Cisco ACI] and it also seemed like the communities behind NSX and the people who were using NSX and the ability that I had to get a response from people was greater on the NSX side. And so, I started looking more into NSX.”

Allen was looking for stories from other customers with similar environments who had found success with SDN, so he could be armed with examples when he went back to his team. He talked to people on Twitter and Reddit who had previously been on the path to SDN like Clark County was on then. Allen wanted to go with an established platform that had a successful track record. After much research, he decided on NSX Data Center.

Intrinsic Security with VMware NSX Data Center

Security was the main driver for Allen, specifically PCI compliancy. With NSX Data Center, security policies can be delivered consistently across heterogeneous workloads, regardless of whether they live in the cloud or on-premises. Security policies are enforced at the individual VM or container level creating micro-segments, which prevent the lateral spread of an attack between and within applications. Micro-segments are defined in software and their policies can be based on attributes like regulatory compliance standards, workload attributes such as machine name, or even user identity. Further, third-party security solutions like next-gen firewalls can be inserted into micro-segments to prevent hair-pinning traffic out to physical devices, maximizing traffic efficiency without sacrificing protection.

Listen to the podcast to learn more from Allen Tyson about how Clark County is using VMware NSX Data Center to protect its data and improve its security posture.

When you’re ready to begin planning your own security journey, you can also read VMware NSX Micro-segmentation Day 1 and Day 2 Guides.