VMware makes major security announcements

VMware has revealed it is acquiring Octarine, a company that provides a security platform for Kubernetes applications, whilst also creating a Security Operations Centre (SOC) Alliance featuring industry-leading vendors.

The news delivered at the company’s recent virtual Connect 2020 cybersecurity conference does much to advance its intrinsic security strategy.

In the case of the acquisition of Octarine, the overall aim is to simplify DevSecOps and secure cloud native environments from development right through to runtime.

Developers are increasingly using Kubernetes and containers to modernise applications, which in turn changes the nature of workloads that need to be secured.

Building Octarine’s Kubernetes security platform into the VMware security portfolio should benefit customers in a variety of ways, by providing full visibility into cloud-native environments, as well as helping them create content-based policies to protect sensitive information. The integration builds risk analysis into the DevOps lifecycle, so problems are spotted before applications are deployed into production. 

“Acquiring Octarine will enable us to further expand VMware’s intrinsic security strategy to containers and Kubernetes environments by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud,” said Patrick Morley, former CEO of Carbon Black and current GM and senior vice president of VMware’s Security Business Unit.

Meanwhile, the creation of the Next-Gen SOC Alliance sees VMware working closely in association with Splunk, IBM Security, Google Cloud’s Chronicle, Exabeam and Sumo Logic, whose products will be integrated with Carbon Black Cloud to streamline and improve SOC operations. This will deliver key XDR capabilities and context into SIEM technologies that power the modern-day SOC.

In addition, the combined solutions will be able to take advantage of VMware’s intrinsic security framework and provide SOC teams with a range of important benefits including:

• Gaining a better insight into the infrastructure and applications being protected
• Obtaining a centralised security viewpoint, which will enable organisations to detect, analyse and respond to data in a unified SIEM at machine speed

“The Next-Gen SOC Alliance brings a critical mass of XDR context and capabilities to SOCs in a fully intrinsic way – one that can uniquely leverage the VMware fabric,” said Tom Barsi, Vice President of Alliances for VMware Carbon Black. “In partnership with the industry’s leading SIEM/SOAR players, we’re setting a strong vision for the modern SOC and delivering unprecedented visibility and remediation capabilities across endpoints, networks, workloads and containers.”