An estimated 23,000 high tech professionals spent last week in Las Vegas listening to the VMware team share their vision for the software defined data center (SDDC) at VMworld 2016 . During the keynote sessions, attendees heard the latest plans around cross cloud Services, cloud foundation, containerization and security.
At Trend Micro we were excited to be aplatinum sponsor again this year, giving us a chance to meet and talk with so many different organizations. This included animated conversations in our funkynew airplane-themed booth, information-rich discussion panels with VMware and our joint customers talking about securing their VMware deployments, and of course―what’s a conference without a party!―a jam packed networking reception on Monday night at the House of Blues.
These conversations at VMworld 2016 highlighted some key trends from a data center security perspective. Let’s take a look at the most popular themes we heard in Las Vegas.
NSX Continues to Gain MomentumNSX, NSX, NSX…..we continually had conversations with organizations who were exploring investing in NSX more closely. This meant that advanced security controls for the SDDC were also front and center in their minds. As a part of the buzz, VMware shared that they now have over 1700 NSX customers around the world―big growth in just 1 year. And we observed that the majority of NSX focused sessions at VMworld were at capacity. Our team showed numerous demos to ‘passengers’ dropping by the Trend booth, outlining how only Trend Micro Deep Security can extend micro-segmentation and provide both network and system security controls for NSX.
Securing the Hybrid Cloud is a Top PriorityPublic Cloud deployments continue to grow steadily and often grab the flashy headlines. However, the reality is that the need for “Hybrid Cloud” deployments are better aligned with where most customers are today. Organizations are looking for a consistent way to secure both their VMware virtualized servers and their workloads on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or other cloud providers. Hybrid Cloud Security that has been specifically designed for hybrid environments has become a priority for data center operations teams.
Legacy Security is a BottleneckMany of the data center operations professionals who visited our booth shared the pain they had encountered trying to stretch their legacy security solution to protect virtualized and cloud environments. They shared the performance challenges of trying to leverage legacy solutions that were designed for traditional endpoints and physical environments and could not properly handle the rigors of ensuring virtualized and cloud workloads were protected in an efficient way. And let’s be clear―virtualization is all about efficiency, so security needs to fit in!
Need to Make Life Easier through Security AutomationWe learned a lot from the data center ops leaders who attended our networking reception, listened in to the Trend Micro customer sessions, and visited our booth―especially about the budget and resources challenges they are facing. They wanted to understand more about how they could better automate the security provisioning and management process to reduce the burden of manual security deployments on their teams.
Focus on Efficient Operations ManagementThe data center ops teams also talked a lot about better visibility and how important this is in their day-to-day lives. We shared how we’ve worked with VMware to be the only security partner that allows the operations team to see virtual machine security status and operational status from asingle view with vRealize Operations Manager. This enables the correlation of system activity with security events, enabling a more holistic and effeicent approach to addressing problems in the virtual data center.
The Converation ContinuesVMworld 2016 was a great chance for us to interact with so many people and hear about the challenges they are encountering when it comes to securing the modern data center. If you want to hear a bit more color on the event and the interesting things that happened, join us for a quick webinar on September 27, 2016. While we won’t be serving drinks like we did at the networking reception, we will be serving up some great information to help you on your quest to efficiently secure your virtual data center and cloud workloads.
You can also learn more about how Trend Micro provides comprehensive security for VMware environments by visiting www.trendmicro.com\vmware