Digital enterprises are investing in private cloud as the foundational infrastructure for their applications. These organizations have to deal with thousands of applications and many of them are crown jewels that power their businesses. Deploying these applications rapidly is challenging, maintaining compliance is getting harder, costs are mounting, and the need for visibility and control keeps growing.
With its industry-leading virtualization solutions, VMware has established itself as a pioneer and global leader in the private cloud market with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). As applications are on-boarded on VCF, lateral security becomes paramount to prevent breaches and ransomware attacks. Additionally, rapid application deployment demands an elastic and self-service load balancer.
The VMware Application Networking and Security (ANS) Division has two primary objectives: to make it easier for customers to secure their private clouds and to deliver application faster. Our mission is to deliver the following highly innovative solutions for world’s most demanding enterprises:
- Zero trust lateral security
- Elastic application load balancing
Our Zero Trust Lateral Security and Application Load Balancing Portfolio
Let’s take a closer look at these two solutions.
- Zero Trust Lateral Security – By now, security stakeholders are well aware that perimeter security, protecting north-south traffic, is no longer enough. Our focus is on a zero trust lateral security solution for east-west traffic, which comprises nearly 80% of all enterprise traffic. Organizations that have deployed our solution have seen nearly 60% fewer breaches and ransomware infections, based on actual customer experiences and validated by third parties.
- Avi Load Balancer – The industry’s first software-defined load balancer, Avi can be deployed in private, public and hybrid cloud environments. Avi provides enormous flexibility in application delivery environments, where it can scale out 90% faster to facilitate rapid deployment.
Both of these solutions were designed to seamlessly integrate with the underlying VCF stack. VCF customers who deploy lateral security and load balancing services will enjoy a “plug and play” experience—along with greater agility and a lower total cost of ownership.
We’re radically simplifying our security and load balancing portfolio
We’re making it much easier for customers to consume our security and load balancing solutions.
The security solution set now includes just two SKUs.
- VMware Firewall: For the network security buyer, the VMware Firewall incorporates a rich feature set comprising VM-level micro-segmentation, application zoning, deep visibility and more. The SKU includes distributed and gateway firewalling, container security and security intelligence capabilities.
- VMware Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP): This SKU includes all the capabilities within the VMware Firewall SKU along with additional IDS/IPS, malware prevention and NTA/NDR capabilities. This is ideal for companies that require deep malware blocking and ransomware attack prevention capabilities as well as threat monitoring. A security operations center (SOC) will gain considerably more value from this offering than the VMware Firewall alone can provide. Of course, existing VMware Firewall-only customers purchase ATP capabilities as an add-on option.
These capabilities seamlessly combine into a security platform that can mitigate a broad array of risks. Without it, organizations would need a cumbersome set of point products from multiple vendors and would need to deal with complexities of multiple consoles, multiple operational models and multiple disparate support teams. Added complexity leads to increased risk posture for breaches and longer recovery time post breach.
We offer the VMware Avi Load Balancer as a single SKU. This includes all features and capabilities, such as local and global server load balancing (GSLB), web application firewall (WAF), Kubernetes ingress, automation and deep application visibility and analytics. The VMware Avi Load Balancer can be purchased with VCF or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or as a standalone offering. The Avi Load Balancer can help networking teams meet scale-out and scale-up requirements across private, public and hybrid cloud deployments.
We’re excited to announce Avi Load Balancer’s new integration with VMware vRealize Automation (vRA). Available in the most recent release of Aria Automation 8.16.1, this will bring even more powerful Load Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS) capabilities to our customers. You can read more about this new offering on the VMware Cloud Management blog. Check out the 2-min demo and technical blog for deployment details.
We’re proud of the comprehensive solution portfolio we’ve assembled. We believe these offerings are among the best lateral security and load balancing solutions available within our industry, and that they can meet even the most demanding requirements.
The Road Ahead
Tomorrow’s private cloud customers will need greater agility and ease of use than today’s. What if they could achieve all of that—along with greater control—at a lower cost? In essence, this is the cloud operating model for which we are building our products.
2024 will see us further our industry-leading track record of innovation. We will build and harden more enterprise-grade features within our solution portfolio. We’ll also maintain our focus on higher performance and scale so that IT teams can operationalize at scale. We’ll continue to further simplify our products for both greenfield and brownfield environments. End result is much improved productivity so that same-size security and load balancing teams can deal with ever-increasing application environments.
While we have AI/ML capabilities under the hood already, we recognize that Generative AI will play a pivotal role in several areas – including cybersecurity, visibility and analytics and product operations. Generative AI will also make it easier for people to navigate their everyday workflows, and it will serve as a training aid. We are enthusiastically innovating in all these areas, and you can see this in action in our latest Project Cypress Demo.
We are seeing enterprise customers transitioning to VCF are adding on lateral security and load balancing capabilities. We believe these offerings provide unparalleled value to our customers.
