Global leaders in virtualisation and cloud computing VMware has partnered with leading security specialists Trend Micro to deliver the first agentless security platform architected for VMware virtualised data centres, virtual desktops, and cloud deployments. 
As per the partnership, the companies are providing customers with VMware vShield Endpoint and Trend Micro Deep Security.
By tightly integrating with and leveraging VMware products and APIs, Trend Micro security and compliance solutions allow VMware customers to increase consolidation rates, accelerate and complete their virtualisation journey, more fully leverage their VMware investments, and maximise their ROI while offering the best in class protection for the virtualised infrastructure.
“There is still a misperception in the market that the cloud and for that matter virtual infrastructures are insecure,” states Chris Norton, regional director, southern Africa at VMware.
“Through our global partnership with Trend Micro we are able to add additional peace of mind right at the VM level negating data breaches, maximising consolidation rates, operational efficiency and cost savings, as well as ensuring compliance with security best practices, internal governance and external regulations.”
VMware vShield Endpoint, is a unique solution that optimises security for use in VMware vSphere and VMware Horizon View environments. It enables offloading of security processing to dedicated, security-hardened virtual machines delivered by VMware partners.
Trend Micro Deep Security provides a security-hardened virtual machine that integrates with VMware vShield Endpoint and other VMware APIs to offer agentless antivirus, integrity monitoring for virtual machines and hypervisor, intrusion detection and prevention, firewall, Web application protection, and application control for VMware virtual machines.
Additional integration with VMware vCenter and vCloud Director co-ordinates security management across VMware virtual and cloud deployments.
The security platform offered by the vendors includes anti-malware, intrusion detection and prevention, integrity monitoring, application control, firewall, log inspection, Web application protection.
Benefits afforded to customers making use of either VMware vShield Endpoint or Trend Micro Deep Security includes:
* Higher density by offloading security scans from individual virtual machines to a single security virtual appliance on each vSphere host;
* Optimised resources by eliminating antivirus storms and resource contention from multiple security agents;
* Simplified management by eliminating agents and the need to configure and update each one; and
* As well as stronger security by providing instant-on protection for new virtual machines and tamper-proof security co-ordinated by the dedicated security appliance.
“There are a number of challenges that face traditional agent-based security solutions when used in a virtual environment as virtualised data centres, desktops, and cloud computing should have the same layers of security as a physical machine,” states Gregory Anderson, country manager at Trend Micro.
“Security that isn’t architected for a virtual environment can result in significant operational issues. Our agentless solutions therefore provide customers with ‘better-than-physical’ protection for virtual and cloud environments.”
With Deep Security, organisations can consolidate all server protection onto one platform, knowing that Deep Security was designed from the start to protect physical, virtual, VDI, and cloud to help address the challenges of virtualisation, the disruptive and costly patch management operations through vulnerabilities shielding, and address the challenges of complying with internal/external regulations and mandates.