NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Most security architectures in private clouds were built to protect a perimeter. Modern attacks do not respect that boundary. Once inside, attackers exploit east–west traffic between workloads to move laterally, escalate privileges, and deploy ransomware, often faster than teams can respond as AI-driven autonomous attacks accelerate threat speed. This “assume breach” reality makes Zero Trust enforcement inside the private cloud (beyond the perimeter) essential.

VMware vDefend is a Zero Trust, software-defined, closed-loop security solution – from visibility, detection, prevention to mitigation, perfectly aligned with NIST cybersecurity framework – vDefend is purpose-built to stop laterally propagating threats in VMware Cloud Foundation private clouds, protecting east–west traffic across VMs, Kubernetes, and AI workloads—without the cost or complexity of traditional appliance-based firewalls.

vDefend is differentiated by hypervisor-embedded Layer-7 firewall enforcement, delivering deep visibility into application traffic and applying security where workloads run. Security policies move automatically as workloads move across servers and sites, and lateral security scales out automatically as additional servers are added to the environment. This allows threat detection and response to remain consistent as private clouds grow and change.

vDefend brings together granular micro-segmentation through a distributed firewall (DFW), advanced threat prevention, and traffic visibility on a unified platform. The DFW 1-2-3-4 enables prescriptive, automated workflows for security teams to simplify deployment of macro and micro segmentation across all workloads in weeks, making comprehensive Zero Trust lateral protection operationally achievable rather than aspirational.

Additionally, the platform delivers high-performance threat detection and response at scale. VMware vDefend supports up to 20 Tbps of Layer-7 next-generation firewall throughput and up to 9 Tbps of intrusion detection and prevention performance. Malware prevention protects against malicious files without performance impact from traffic decryption.

According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact Study, organizations using VMware vDefend achieved a 40% reduction in breach risk, a 25% improvement in security operations productivity, a 45% faster rapid segmentation deployment, up to 50% lower security hardware costs, a 116% return on investment with an eight-month payback period and a 12.5% mitigation in cybersecurity insurance premiums. The IDC Business Value Study highlights 90% more segmentation coverage and increased protection (77%) of east–west traffic. vDefend Advanced Threat Prevention earned a AAA rating from SE Labs and aligns with PCI-DSS and HIPAA applicability requirements.

Dubai Airports, St. John’s Health, USSFCU, and Cole Engineering document measurable improvements in threat visibility, operational efficiency, and Zero Trust maturity with vDefend.