Cloud infrastructure and virtualisation company, VMware, is bundling its solutions together in a move it believes will transform hybrid cloud security for mobile end-users.
The company is combining VMware NSX network virtualisation and the company's business mobility solutions, AirWatch and VMware Horizon solutions.
The solution will address the enterprise security challenge of over-provisioned data centre access through the use of network micro-segmentation, says VMWare.
In addition, this combination creates an individualised virtual network that allows users or groups to access only the specific applications within the data centre to which they are authorised.
According to Nick Black, business manager, end-user computing, sub-Saharan Africa at VMware, turning traditional hardware-based security controls into software allows for easy, fast and yet user-specific policies to be leveraged by millions of devices with ease.
IDC says more than 65% of enterprise IT organisations globally will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organisations.
Hybrid cloud architectures are becoming a key part of many businesses' cloud strategies, making it even more important for organisations to make the business case now for using hybrid cloud environments so that they are not left behind, says IDC.
The new VMware solution is about addressing individual security requirements at a personal level, says Black.
In the past, the IT team would implement a generic security policy that more or less covered the bases in terms of permissions, rights and access control, he says.
However, if there was a particular individual that needed more security, or more specific policies due to the nature of the content they used, then this would create a management nightmare to address through a complex and expensive solution, Black adds.
When you combine virtual or software-defined networking solutions, it allows for unique policies to be applied per user or per device specific to that context without any complex intervention from IT and with no scalability or performance concerns.
He points out organisations should not have to compromise on mobility because of security concerns. There is significant interest in a new model of IT globally and in South Africa.
As organisations move toward third platform adoption, they will expose more of their data centre resources to an increasing number of devices and users, says Brad Casemore, research director, data centre networks at IDC.
This will introduce increased risk, and require a reassessment of data centre security strategies - highly-segmented virtualised data centre networks, combined with identity-based end-point security, represents a step forward in solving some third platform security challenges, he says.
Share