VMware: Lateral security enhancements tackle blindspots

Security teams can ‘no longer rely on disparate security approaches’ that leave blind spots, VMware has warned as the company announces improvements to its Carbon Black security platform.

Unveiled at VMware Explore Europe, VMware said Carbon Black Enterprise XDR significantly improves threat detection and prevention across endpoints and networks.

A consolidation of tools and data that provides extended visibility, analysis, and response across endpoints, workloads, users, and networks, Extended Detection and Response (XDR) unifies endpoint and workload security capabilities with critical visibility into the network and cloud: reducing blind spots, detecting threats faster, and automating remediation via authoritative context across these domains. 

“As multi-cloud environments grow in complexity, security teams are challenged with increasing sophistication and scale of attacks,” says Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's Networking and Advanced Security business group. “They can no longer rely on disparate security approaches that leave blind spots in coverage. 

Enhancing lateral security as early XDR adopters benefit from automation and an increased ROI

VMware says its new XDR solution greatly enhances lateral security by leveraging telemetry within its cloud-delivered threat detection tool Contexa. 

Introduced earlier this year, VMware Contexa records and processes over 1.5 trillion endpoint events and over 10 billion network flows daily, along with strategically curated threat intelligence data captured through technology partnerships. VMware says this context is further analysed using machine learning and insights of over 500 researchers across VMware’s Threat Analysis Unit and incident response partners.

According to a recent Forrester study, 3 in 4 organisations have not yet adopted XDR, but 27% are planning to in the next 12 months. The study found that early adopters of XDR benefited from automation, unified detection from tools, and an increased ROI, which makes them believe that the market for XDR will mature and be the way of the future. The early adopters of XDR also found that XDR complements other technologies in their tech stack, allowing their employees to focus on more targeted attacks.

“With VMware Carbon Black XDR, we're advancing our leadership in lateral security for traditional and modern applications by enabling customers to inspect each endpoint, packet, and process across their environment,” adds Gillis.

At VMware Explore Europe the company has also announced an advancement in its partnership with HPE, along with upgrades to its Tanzu cloud-native app portfolio and Aria cloud management platform.