VMware by Broadcom: VMware vDefend – Enabling Zero Trust Lateral Security at Scale

Additional Info

CompanyVMware by Broadcom
Websitehttps://www.vmware.com
Company size (employees)10,000 or more
Headquarters RegionNorth America

Overview

VMware vDefend is a comprehensive Zero Trust Lateral security solution designed to protect private cloud workloads by isolating workloads and verifying access permissions to align with Zero Trust principles. Its Distributed Firewall applies granular, attribute-based policies to enforce least-privilege access, eliminate lateral movement, and reduce the attack surface. vDefend’s Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) combines Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA), and Malware Prevention services with multi-context Network Detection and Response (NDR) to deliver unparalleled visibility, detection, and response for your private cloud workloads.

The solution incorporates advanced capabilities such as Generative AI-driven Intelligent Assist, enabling organizations to detect and mitigate threats faster. These technologies correlate alerts, identify intrusion campaigns, and provide natural-language explanations and actionable remediation steps, accelerating incident response and reducing SOC workloads.

Hypervisor-level integration enhances visibility into east-west and north-south traffic, delivering unparalleled insights to detect ransomware, zero-day vulnerabilities, and advanced persistent threats. For example, VMware vDefend has enabled financial institutions to isolate sensitive customer data and block lateral ransomware spread while maintaining regulatory compliance. Healthcare organizations have relied on vDefend to safeguard patient records and achieve alignment with PCI, HIPAA, and GLBA mandates.

VMware vDefend’s micro-segmentation capabilities dynamically isolate workloads, ensuring that sensitive data and critical applications remain protected.. Designed for scalability, VMware vDefend integrates seamlessly with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), securing thousands of workloads, including virtual machines, containers, and bare metal servers. Its centralized policy management simplifies operations, helping organizations operationalize Zero Trust security at scale while reducing complexity.

By delivering dynamic, adaptive security with operational simplicity, VMware vDefend empowers enterprises to proactively defend against cyber threats, safeguard sensitive data, and streamline compliance.

Key Capabilities / Features

- Distributed Firewall with Micro-Segmentation: Applies dynamic, attribute-based policies to isolate workloads, reduce the attack surface, and eliminate lateral movement. Financial institutions have used VMware vDefend’s micro-segmentation to protect customer data while maintaining operational agility.
- Advanced Threat Protection (ATP): Correlates threat activity and visualizes intrusion campaigns, enabling SOC teams to respond faster while reducing false positives. VMware vDefend has helped enterprises identify ransomware intrusion campaigns and mitigate threats in real-time, safeguarding critical assets.
- Generative AI-Powered Intelligent Assist: Automates threat correlation, provides natural-language explanations of attack chains, and recommends actionable remediation, accelerating response times and reducing manual SOC workloads.
- Compliance Support: Streamlines regulatory compliance with features like IDS/IPS, TLS decryption, and network sandboxing, enabling organizations to meet PCI, HIPAA, and GLBA mandates without compromising operational efficiency.
- Scalability Across Diverse Workloads: Protects virtual machines, containers, and bare metal servers, ensuring consistent, centralized policy enforcement across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VMware vDefend simplifies complex Zero Trust deployments, making enterprise-wide security achievable at scale.


How we are different

- Unmatched Zero Trust Capabilities: VMware vDefend combines core foundational blocks for Zero Trust, such as micro-segmentation and layers on advanced threat prevention capabilities powered by AI/ML and generative AI to enforce least-privilege access, dynamically isolate workloads, detect malicious behavior, and prevent lateral movement. Hypervisor-level integration provides unparalleled visibility into traffic across thousands of workloads, ensuring adaptive protection against ransomware, zero-day vulnerabilities, and advanced persistent threats. VMware vDefend delivers the comprehensive security that traditional defenses cannot match.
- Simplified Scalability and Operations: VMware vDefend integrates seamlessly with VMware Cloud Foundation, offering plug-and-play deployment of security for all private cloud workloads, enabling self-service provisioning of applications at cloud speed. Its centralized console unifies policy management, enabling security teams to automate policy updates and enforce Zero Trust security at scale without adding operational overhead.
- Proven Industry Impact: Customers report 39% increased productivity, 45% faster deployment, due to VMware vDefend’s automated policy enforcement and threat detection capabilities. As mentioned, financial institutions have used VMware vDefend to protect sensitive customer data from ransomware campaigns, while healthcare providers leverage it to safeguard patient records and maintain compliance with PCI, HIPAA, and GLBA.


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