VMware announces AppDefense security solution

VMware has revealed how it wants to help businesses across the world keep their data secure.

At the company’s VMworld Europe 2017 event in Barcelona earlier this week, CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined the company’s new security strategy, including how its new AppDefense tool can help enterprises of all sizes stay safe online.

"We need a new approach to security," Gelsinger noted, "we need to make it easy for you to do these things well."

Launched a few weeks ago at the US VMworld event, VMware’s Barcelona event was the first chance for the company to fully outline just how AppDefense can benefit businesses.

With Gelsinger naming security as, "the most important topic of all," the company has bet big on its cloud safety tools becoming an invaluable resource for customers.

"When you talk about security, the assignment is actually fairly easy... but when you think about today's world, the target is getting larger, with users, devices, networks and services, and if you, the CIO, don't protect that any more, how do you protect that in a targeted world?"

Noting that security spend is often the largest part of a company’s IT budget, Gelsinger noted that unlike other areas of business, often spending big doesn’t always ensure results, noting, "something is terribly wrong... you're spending more but you're falling farther behind."

"We need a new approach," he said, "VMware thinks differently about security -- We need to make it easy for you to do these things well."

AppDefense forms part of this new approach, which Gelsinger says goes from the traditional view of "chasing bad," where security tools constantly scan and track for any corruptions. Instead, VMware is pushing a view it calls "ensuring good," whereby AppDefense allows a machine to learn from its own behaviour and create a default "good" model of how it should be running. The service is then able to quickly detect any unwanted changes, with automated responses quickly able to secure the ecosystem in real-time, and prevent further damage.

"If we do these things, we truly can change the game in security," Gelsinger concluded.

"The growing frequency and cost of security incidents points to a fundamental flaw in security models that focus solely on chasing threats," Tom Corn, VMware’s senior vice president of security products, added.

"AppDefense delivers an intent-based security model that focuses on what the applications should do -- the known good -- rather than what the attackers do -- the known bad. We believe it will do for compute, what VMware NSX and micro-segmentation did for the network; enable least privilege environments for critical applications."

At the event, VMware also revealed that it had extended its Mobile Security Alliance, adding six new partners to bring the total to 23 companies across six regions as it looks to bridge the gaps between existing legacy security tools and provide a foundational platform for securing all mobile endpoints across an enterprise.

"Security attack vectors are growing as the number of endpoint platforms, apps, and user types steadily increase," explained Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager, end-user computing, VMware.

"Organizations must adopt a new approach that is first and foremost powered by an inherently-secure infrastructure, and secondly includes a deeply-integrated ecosystem to stitch together existing security silos, providing visibility across all users, apps, and devices."

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