A new version of Kaspersky Security for Virtualisation Light Agent, part of Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security, responds to enterprises’ demand for virtualisation security and scalability.

It optimises protection rollout for larger virtual machine deployments and simplifies security management across an entire infrastructure — with a new advanced Security Virtual Machines (SVM) selection algorithm and role-based access control (RBAC) now available through Kaspersky Security Center.

Among the new features, there is also behaviour-based protection, exploit and intrusion prevention now available for Windows Server guest OS, as well as compatibility with Kaspersky EDR in virtualised environments.

Growing network infrastructures and their complexities create difficulties for IT security departments in larger organisations. The potential attack surface is always widening, so security teams need to be confident that all parts of it, including virtualised servers and VDI, are protected — even if there are tens of thousands of them.

The updated version of Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security is enterprise-ready and allows customers to deploy protection to up to 100,000 virtual servers and VDI — without sacrificing performance or losing control and visibility over virtualsed infrastructures.

Deployment of a security solution and its scaling is often a resource-intensive task that overloads the network and requires hard, manual work from responsible staff. In the new version of Kaspersky Security for Virtualisation Light Agent, the advanced mechanism of Security Virtual Machines (SVM) discovery and selection enables more flexible choice of SVM for light agent installation, which overall makes security deployment and failover faster and automates load balancing. If there is a need to deploy a new SVM on additional or existing hosts, administrators can now automate configuration of new security virtual machines using hypervisor deployment capabilities via API.

In addition, role-based access control (RBAC) within Kaspersky Security Center is now supported in Kaspersky Security for Virtualisation Light Agent, streamlining virtualisation security management, which is key to large organisations with diverse teams and infrastructures. Due to this approach being commonly used in large organisations, permissions are assigned to specific roles, not individual employees, who can share responsibilities within the role, for example, to perform specific security-related tasks.

Protection for virtual Windows servers is now packed with the same security features as in Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, including exploit prevention and behaviour detection that enables the detection and rolling back malicious actions of even the most sophisticated and unknown threats. This means Kaspersky’s protection for virtual infrastructure closes in functionality to the traditional endpoint security solution but maintains all performance benefits of a ‘light agent’.

Additionally, for customers who already use or want to deploy an advanced level of attack detection and response technologies, Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response agent is fully compatible with Kaspersky Security for Virtualisation Light Agent.

Kaspersky continues to widen its integration of Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security with virtualisation platforms in order to allow customers to access the security solution on the virtualisation platforms they are used to. The existing platform support is also broadened with VMware NSX Tags support that allows automated response to specific events for each VM.

“As many analysts have predicted, cloud infrastructure in business is growing, helping organisations save resources and operate faster. Cloud is a major business enabler, but also a great headache for IT security managers. They need to keep all parts of an infrastructure secure, without slowing down, due to growing business complexity. Threats always exist, and if organisations compromise on security, this increases the risk of incident. We at Kaspersky understand this and deliver an essential level of manageability and scalability of protection – in combination with proven security features in the next generation in our solution,” comments Sergey Martsynkyan, Head of B2B Product Marketing at Kaspersky.