 "VMware, EMC Ally To Enhance Security Of Virtual Environments")
In a joint effort to help customers gain the efficiency benefits of virtualisation across sensitive information and applications, VMware and EMC have announced an expansion of their strategic alliance, capitalising on the work being done between VMware and EMC’s RSA security division to enable advanced information-centric security functions within VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud.
“RSA and VMware are in a position to capitalise on the intersection of virtualisation and security,” said Art Coviello, president, RSA, The Security Division of EMC. “The very dynamics of a virtual environment – where classic perimeters and boundaries no longer exist – strengthens the case for our information-centric approach to security. We believe this combined approach will empower organisations to accelerate their journey towards a 100 percent virtual infrastructure with confidence in the security of their environment.”
Both VMware and RSA are engaged in a multi-pronged effort to help customers understand the security opportunities in virtual environments and to validate the interoperability of RSA’s security products with VMware vSphere 4, helping lead to the delivery of virtual infrastructure solutions designed to increase an organisation’s security posture beyond what is possible in today’s physical IT infrastructure. This includes collaboration that extends and enhances the VMware VMsafe technology along with further development of solutions that enable features such as data loss prevention, authentication and security information and event management within virtual IT infrastructure environments.
The collaborative effort between RSA and VMware demonstrates a key point of control that would enable customers to deploy DLP in the form of applications that inspect data traversing virtual networks. This would help protect sensitive data close to the source using a centrally managed set of policies and enforcement controls to prevent data loss in the virtual data centre. A combined VMware vShield Zones and RSA DLP solution is an innovative example that achieves a single point of security control without introducing a single point of failure.