Businesses are constantly looking for ways to grow revenues, increase shareholder value, and gain a competitive edge over their competition. In today’s hypercompetitive and connected world, technology-enabled business services play a key role in making this happen. Businesses employ technology to:
- Deliver fast and agile business services to create new products and services or disrupt existing revenue and service delivery models.
- Reduce asset redundancies, optimize resources, and enhance cost savings to make the organization leaner and more agile to change.
“Keeping up with the speed of business” is the mantra that IT operations takes to heart very seriously. Virtualization and software-defined technologies play critical roles in this realizing this transformative business model.
Security has been lagging and struggles to keep up with this transformation. For many organizations, security processes and frameworks remain semi-automated, require the management and integration of multiple point products, and rely on traditional perimeter-centric security models. Security in software-defined data centers (SDDC) is different:
- Agent-based solutions are network and resource intensive and not economically scalable. Security that is embedded into the hypervisor and delivered and centrally managed from the host as security virtual appliances (SVAs) offers a more operationally efficient and effective approach.
- Virtual and cloud workloads are highly mobile and dynamic. Application-level security settings and policies would mitigate the lateral spread of infection in the event of a compromised VM, and allow workloads of various trust levels to co-mingle securely within the same physical host.
- Lack of visibility and control over VM to VM traffic in mobile and highly abstracted environments are best addressed by security that is integrated with the IT process/DevOps automation processes and has autodiscovery, self-auditing, and self-cleansing capabilities.
Today’s security organizations are looking for the ability to simplify and deliver security across their traditional well as their next generation data center.
Is your security ready for this new model of IT?
Security is different in the next generation data center and current security practices and frameworks that are designed for traditional IT need to adapt. Is your security agile and able to keep up with the changes in business and IT?
- How long does it take to provision security for newly created workloads?
- Do you have the ability to deliver close-to real time, agentless threat protection for newly provisioned workloads and services?
- If there is a new critical vulnerability, how fast can you scan, assess, and secure your systems from exploits?
- If a workload is compromised, how fast can you prevent the lateral spread of infection?
- How quickly can you adjust security policies and settings in response to an unauthorized change in the application’s configuration settings?
Symantec Data Center Security: Agile Security for the New Model of IT
Symantec Data Center Security enables you to embed security into your IT processes and deliver security services that allow you to keep up with the speed of business. Symantec Data Center Security (DCS) automates and orchestrates application-level server security across physical and virtual servers, as well as across public and private clouds.
At VMworld 2015 in San Francisco, CA, Symantec will feature Data Center Security 6.5 and preview Symantec Data Center Security 6.6, which is scheduled to release in Fall 2015.
Symantec Data Center Security 6.5, which started shipping in March 2015, introduced Operations Director, a feature that simplifies security management via policy based orchestration. Operations Director delivers significant benefits to the Security Operations team by allowing the organization’s security best practices to be codified into a set of rules that be automated across the environment. Symantec Data Center Security 6.5 orchestrates application-level security provisioning and delivers agentless threat protection (DCS: Server), server hardening (DCS: Server Advanced), third-party security firewall services (Palo Alto Next Generation Firewall), and networking microsegmentation (VMware NSX) to newly created workloads. Native integration with VMware vCenter tightly couples security provisioning with the IT Ops automation process and gives IT Ops visibility into security provisioning of newly created VMware workloads. Support for IT Ops/Dev Ops automation tools including Chef, Puppet and Ansible enabled customers to orchestrate application-level hardening during the IT provisioning process in non-VMware environments. Data Center Security 6.5 also delivered security monitoring of AWS and OpenStack clouds, and hardening of OpenStack Keystone.
The upcoming Symantec Data Center Security 6.6 builds upon and extends these capabilities. The next release extends agentless threat protection into vCNS/vShield workloads and integrates with Symantec DeepSight’s real-time global threat information and analytics. Symantec Data Center Security 6.6 also adds Rapid 7 Nexpose integration to Operations Director to deliver automated real-time response to critical vulnerabilities by applying quarantine controls using HIPS/HIDS or Firewall policies. These enhanced capabilities and third-party integration expands the use case to include real-time response and remediation to critical new vulnerabilities and unauthorized server configuration changes. These enhancements give customers the ability to orchestrate security throughout the lifecycle of a workload.
Key highlights of Data Center Security 6.6 are:
- Agentless anti-malware support for VMware vShield/vCNS
- Integration with Symantec DeepSight
- Operations Director integration with Palo Alto Networks & Rapid7 Nexpose
- Network IPS now supports IPv6 virtual environment
- Ability to blacklist and whitelist URLs
- New rule builder in Operations Director to codify security provisioning and threat response best practices.
Symantec will hold a series of sessions at the Symantec Theater at the Solutions Exchange at VMworld. In addition, customers and partners are invited to preview Symantec Data Center Security 6.6 during Symantec’s Customer Appreciation Event at the Press Club on Yerba Buena Lane in San Francisco on September 2.
To find out more, visit us at VMworld booth #713.