Article Trust Nobody: Ensure Zero Trust Security Across the Entire Network
By Insight UK / 20 Jun 2022
By Insight UK / 20 Jun 2022
As a service provider you are always looking how to differentiate your offerings and services from others. That is how you enable your customers to innovate and increase their value. However, if there is one place where you should always and persistently strive to improve and offer the latest services, it is security. Without a doubt.
Whether it is the security that you use to ensure your customers’ data is safe, or the services you provide, or both, it is paramount to have a reliable suite of services that you can trust.
Speaking of trust as one of the basic concepts in IT security today, let’s talk about 'Zero Trust'. The term is bandied around a great deal, but what does it mean, at least at a high level, for you and your customers?
The concept behind Zero Trust is quite easy to grasp: every single interaction and associated transaction starts out as untrusted; even within the perimeter of the corporate network. Through context and associated policies, permissions are applied to the interaction and authenticated for every access. The fundamental principle of Zero Trust is really simple: ‘never trust, always verify’. But how do you as a service provider plan, implement and manage such an estate without introducing unwanted and undesired complexity?
The ever growing estate that you have to protect is expanding and has become distributed, including on-premise, edge and public clouds. Also, usage has changed dramatically with a workforce that is increasingly mobile and working from home. The challenge is to find the balance between continually enable your services and those of your customers while mitigating as many risks as possible. This can be a daunting task for any service provider. Fortunately, there is help on hand.
Help is nearby with VMware’s extended security portfolio. Under the core principle of ‘never trust, always verify’ VMware has adopted an array of Zero Trust strategies in their security solutions to remediate vulnerabilities in organizations of all kinds. Their solutions for a robust, modern security architecture are built on five Zero Trust pillars, across these following areas:
Unfortunately, every upside has a downside: VMware offers too many security services to focus on within this article. So, let’s pick one and look at NSX to start with.
NSX is VMware’s network virtualization and security platform. The NSX portfolio offers solutions to help you secure all of your estates. Implementing and using NSX, you are able to securely connect and manage on-premise data centres and public clouds such as VMware Cloud on AWS. You will gain the ability to use the same extended network across multiple, geographically diverse datacentres, thus enabling you to provide geo-redundant services.
The management, using a single pane of glass for enhanced and consistent visibility, enables you to enforce your polices across multiple datacentres and execution venues. This includes features such as network segmentation and micro-segmentation, right across your assets. Combined with VMware HCX, you are able to migrate running services* that number in the thousands across data centres and public clouds. The ability to migrate rapidly and securely at scale is a huge asset in accelerating your digital migration and that of your customers.
*dependent on the type of service, latency and network bandwidth
As you can see from this article alone, there is a lot of information to cover! If you would like to speak with anyone from our Cloud Channel team at Insight, let us know. We will be happy to spend some time talking through your requirements and will work collaboratively with you to attain your objectives and those of your customers.
VMware’s portfolio of security products to help you on your Zero Trust journey includes the following: |
|
CloudHealth Secure State |
Security purpose-built for workloads |
NSX Service-Defined Firewall |
Layer 7 internal firewall |
Tanzu Advanced |
Secure and simplify containers and deliver modern apps |
VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload |
Security purpose-built for workloads |
VMware Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint |
Cloud-native endpoint protection |
VMware SASE Platform |
Secure and reliable access to apps |
Workspace Security |
Insights, app analytics, and automation |
As a VMware Aggregator Partner, Insight is pleased to offer VMware’s NSX together with a raft of other products and solutions as part of the VMware Cloud Provider Programme. Contact one of our cloud specialists for a talk.
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