VMware vDefend Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) is a cutting-edge, AI/ML-driven solution that safeguards private cloud workloads against ransomware and advanced cyber threats.
Combining Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA), and Malware Prevention services with multi-context Network Detection and Response (NDR), vDefend delivers unparalleled visibility, detection, and response capabilities for north-south and east-west traffic.
Key innovations include its Generative AI-powered Intelligent Assist, which accelerates threat triage and remediation by automating analysis and delivering contextual explanations. With hypervisor-integrated guest introspection, vDefend provides complete visibility into VM workloads and encrypted files, ensuring even legacy systems without endpoint coverage remain protected.
The solution scales seamlessly within VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), enabling organizations to deploy robust security defenses across thousands of workloads without operational disruption. vDefend’s proactive approach has been instrumental in protecting enterprises in critical industries such as finance, healthcare, and government, reducing detection times, and preventing lateral threat movement.
Key Capabilities / Features
- Generative AI-Powered Intelligent Assist: Simplifies SOC operations with natural-language explanations of attack chains, automated alert correlation, and recommended remediation strategies. This reduces manual effort and improves operational efficiency.
- Hypervisor-Level Threat Visibility: vDefend’s distributed architecture delivers comprehensive visibility across every workload on every host, eliminating blind spots. Its hypervisor-level integration delivers advanced features such as guest introspection and provides unmatched visibility into VM activity, file systems, and encrypted files, enabling detection of even the most sophisticated threats. Advanced NDR and Ransomware Recovery: Aggregates signals from IDS/IPS, NTA, and malware prevention to create high-fidelity threat campaigns mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. VMware Live Recovery ensures swift restoration of operations following a ransomware attack, minimizing damage and downtime.
- Compliance and Scalability: Supports compliance mandates (e.g., PCI, HIPAA) and scales effortlessly across thousands of workloads within VMware Cloud Foundation. This ensures consistent, enterprise-wide protection for industries like finance, healthcare, and government.
How we are different
- Comprehensive Threat Defense: VMware vDefend unifies IDS/IPS, NTA, and malware prevention with AI/ML-powered analytics into a single platform. This multi-layered defense-in-depth approach detects advanced threats like zero-day malware while significantly reducing false positives. The integrated NDR correlates data from multiple sources, enriching threat insights and enabling faster remediation.
- Proven ROI and Industry Impact: Organizations report 54% lower three-year operational costs, 610% ROI, and a six-month payback period, making vDefend one of the most cost-effective advanced threat prevention solutions on the market. It has protected financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies from ransomware and lateral attacks while improving efficiency in SOC workflows.
- Tailored, Scalable Protections: vDefend’s ability to deploy custom IDS/IPS signatures ensures protection against industry-specific threats, such as SCADA attacks in critical infrastructure or ransomware in healthcare. Its hypervisor-level security and integration with VMware Cloud Foundation ensure seamless scalability across thousands of workloads, including legacy systems.
About this category: Threat Detection and Response
The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards recognize products that detect and respond to threats across an organization. It is the broad detection category, for products that draw on several data sources or fit no narrower category.
An independent jury of security practitioners, analysts and CISOs scores each nomination on leadership, innovation and impact. Each nomination competes in its category against organizations of similar size and region. Entry packages, sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.
Community Choice voting for the 2025 season closed on July 10, 2025.
What is the Community Choice Award?
A separate award decided by public vote, independent of the jury awards. Each completed share of a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook or X counted as one vote.
2027 award season
Nominations closeFebruary 27, 2027
Jury winners announcedWeek of March 22
Community Choice voting closesJuly 10, 2027
Nominate in this category
Enter a nomination in Threat Detection and Response. Review takes about one business day.
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Cast your vote by sharing this nominee’s profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, or X, using the buttons above. Each completed social share adds one Community Choice vote.
Votes cast by July 10, 2027 will determine the Community Choice winners (independent of the jury awards). Winners will be announced before Black Hat USA.
What is the Community Choice Award? →
Community Choice is a separate award track from the jury-selected Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. Jury winners are chosen by expert judges, while Community Choice winners are determined by public voting. A nominee may be honored by the jury, the community, or both.
Also recognized in Threat Detection and Response, 2025
To keep judging fair, each entry is judged against peers in its segment, so a category can have more than one Gold winner.
