EMC Security Division Helps Provide Customers Advanced Security Policy and Controls in VMware Environments
RSA CONFERENCE 2010 – SAN FRANCISCO, CA— RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), today outlined a strategic vision and a set of RSA solutions and services to help enterprises address the security and compliance of information and identities within VMware® environments.
"Organizations that fail to proactively integrate security into their virtualization and private cloud strategies will deny themselves the opportunity to exploit the full value of virtualization," said Christopher Young, Senior Vice President, Technology of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. "With the offerings we have available today, RSA continues to demonstrate that virtualization can actually improve security and help lead our customers toward 100% virtualization, which will enable a secure journey to the private cloud."
Many of the security challenges in a virtual infrastructure are similar to those in physical computing environments. One advantage of virtualization is better visibility and control through centralized management, offering IT organizations a more advanced solution for datacenter and endpoint protection. RSA has products and services expertise designed to leverage the key control points within VMware environments to enforce advanced security policy that help protect identities, secure information and monitor infrastructure. As a result, RSA can help organizations ensure their virtual infrastructure can adhere to strict information security policies, support service level agreements and maximize flexibility while minimizing cost and complexity.
"Organizations are embracing virtualization and are seeking to take the risk out of the transition from physical to virtualized environments," said Jon Oltsik, Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "By ensuring the security and compliance of endpoints, mission critical applications and information, organizations can expand virtualization faster and more confidently."
RSA Solutions and Services for Virtual Desktops and Data Centers
Through its ongoing technology development partnership with VMware, RSA has worked to ensure three of its core security products - RSA SecurID® strong authentication, the RSA enVision® platform and RSA® Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Endpoint software - operate within VMware environments. This enables enterprise IT organizations to deploy security and management controls that span both physical and virtual environments with industry-leading RSA products they've already invested in.
Technology capabilities delivered by RSA for use in VMware vSphere™ and VMware View™ environments include:
- Ensure Data Confidentiality: RSA addresses the risk of sensitive data leakage for virtual desktops within the VMware View environment by delivering interoperability with the RSA DLP Suite. Specifically, with RSA DLP Endpoint, administrators can configure data detection policies to discover sensitive information and enforce controls across all workstations and remote laptops in the enterprise from a centralized location.
- Monitor Security Events and Demonstrate Compliance: The RSA enVision security information and event management (SIEM) platform now delivers the ability to monitor and report on administrator actions and operational events within both VMware View and VMware vSphere environments to enable organizations to make better security decisions and help maintain policy compliance based on more accurate and timely security intelligence. A new collector has been built within the RSA enVision platform to collect more than 350 events from the VMware platform to deliver these capabilities. RSA enVision SIEM spans physical and virtual environments with the same management, policy and reporting framework to help bring VMware environments under a consistent and centralized set of controls.
- Establish Trusted Identities: RSA SecurID two-factor authentication provides an added layer of security to ensure the right user can access the relevant virtual session within the virtual desktop environment. Specifically, RSA SecurID technology is engineered to integrate with VMware View to enable customers to enforce strong authentication to the VMware View portal, VMware vSphere Management Assistant and with the VMware ESX Service Console to protect administrative access.
In addition, the RSA Security Practice of EMC Consulting offers comprehensive advisory and consulting services for virtualized environments. The new services for securing virtual desktop deployments leverage RSA best practices and established safeguards to help build secure virtualized and private cloud environments through technology, policy and program development. (See related EMC news release EMC Expands Security Consulting Services.)
"Our collaboration with RSA helps deliver security policy management at the three fundamental levels of identity, information and infrastructure to help ensure customers' key enterprise assets remain available, shareable and secure," said Hatem Naguib, vice president, alliances, VMware. "We now have the opportunity to bake in protection and control enhancements to help customers deploy private cloud environments that provide consistent security up and down the virtual stack."
RSA Solutions Extend to Protect Vblock™
RSA technologies have also been validated to protect the Vblock Infrastructure Packages recently announced by the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, which was formed by Cisco and EMC together with VMware. RSA security solutions are layered onto the Vblock architecture to offer built-in security features that integrate with customers' IT and security operations. Vblock technology is designed to extend a customer's existing enterprise security controls to the virtual infrastructure and integrates with existing security products and frameworks to help minimize risk when adopting private cloud infrastructures.
Further security innovation continues between RSA and its technology partners to build in end-to-end trust into virtual and cloud environments to create a more secure, transparent and accountable infrastructure. RSA this week announced a shared vision and proof-of-concept leveraging technology and expertise from RSA as well as from partners Intel and VMware. This proof of concept comprises a hardware root of trust, secure virtualization environment, security information and event management and GRC management software to provide unprecedented visibility into actual conditions within the bottom-most layers of the cloud. A demo is being shown publicly for the first time at this week's RSA Conference in San Francisco. (See related news release EMC Collaborates with VMware and Intel to Delivery Proof of Concept for Business-Critical Security, Compliance and Control in the Cloud).
About RSA
RSA, The Security Division of EMC, is the premier provider of security solutions for business acceleration, helping the world's leading organizations succeed by solving their most complex and sensitive security challenges. RSA's information-centric approach to security guards the integrity and confidentiality of information throughout its lifecycle - no matter where it moves, who accesses it or how it is used.RSA offers industry-leading solutions in identity assurance & access control, data loss prevention, encryption & key management, compliance & security information management and fraud protection. These solutions bring trust to millions of user identities, the transactions that they perform, and the data that is generated. For more information, please visit www.RSA.com and www.EMC.com.