VMware Debuts Security Appliance

February 27, 2009: Virtualisation specialist VMware has announced the addition of a new security appliance to its stable of products, saying its new vShield Zones delivers strict compliance with security policies and industry regulations as organisations increasingly move to virtual environments.

Previously compliance required diverting network traffic to external physical appliances, resulting in disconnected ‘islands’ of infrastructure according to the firm. With its vShield Zones, VMware says that companies will be able to create logical zones in virtual data centres that span all of the shared physical resources, with each zone representing a distinct level of trust and confidentiality.

It claims that this will enable businesses to comply with corporate security policies and regulations on data privacy while still running applications efficiently on shared computing resource pools. It does this by enabling administrators to create security zones within enterprises or in multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, where security policies are enforced even as virtual machines dynamically migrate between hardware devices.

VMware says that deployed as a virtual appliance and integrated with its vCenter Server, vShield Zones helps make it easy to centrally manage and enforce compliance with security policies across large pools of servers and virtual machines. Built-in auditing capabilities make compliance straightforward and verifiable.

“VMware virtualisation solutions have enabled companies to pool their computing resources and deliver IT as a dynamic, shared service,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president, server business unit, VMware. “VMware vShield Zones enhances this architecture by enabling customers to segment and isolate their application traffic in a shared environment, thereby delivering new security benefits and making VMware Infrastructure a safe place to run business critical applications.”

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