Antivirus and internet security vendor BitDefender has expanded its enterprise-level cloud support by extending compatibility with Microsoft’s Azure VMware Solution (AVS).
Martin Zugec, technical solutions manager at BitDefender, said its GravityZone unified security platform for virtualised environments had been tested and validated to work with AVS, including integration for better visibility, “industry-leading” threat prevention, detection and response as well as intelligent caching.
“These features significantly reduce IOPS, memory, and CPU usage, improve performance, and reduce operational costs,” Zugec said in a blog post.
“AVS is a private cloud offering hosted by Microsoft and meets customers where they are today, providing an easy path to a hybrid cloud strategy. Adopting hybrid cloud model is not recommended without the proper security tools and infrastructure in place.”
According to Microsoft, AVS helps customers manage their Azure environment with VMware tools — which can also help them move or extend on-prem VMware environments to Azure.
Adoption of a private cloud of hosted vSphere clusters can reduce the need to rearchitect applications, noted Zugec.
Zugec said that hybrid cloud introduces new security challenges for adopters, while older infrastructure may not work well with cloud-based workloads.
“While Microsoft manages the security ‘of’ the cloud, security ‘in’ the cloud is still the customer’s responsibility,” he said.
“Adopting the cloud model not only expands your organisation’s security perimeter – a challenge on its own – but often leads to fragmentation of IT solutions, increased complexity and limited visibility.”
BitDefender GravityZone Security for Containers was announced in late July, expanding the cybersecurity specialist’s cloud workload security offering with run-time support for containers and Linux kernel independence.
The new solution delivers threat prevention, extended endpoint detection and response (XEDR) and anti-exploit protection for containers running in private and public clouds, viewed and controlled via unified cybersecurity platform GravityZone. According to BitDefender, the solution can assist with stability and speed of deployment.
GravityZone Security for Containers also maps cloud workload container attacks to the year-old Mitre Att&ck (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques and Common Knowledge) evaluation framework.
According to BitDefender’s Andrei Pisau, Mitre Att&ck is “one of the most complete, complex and realistic” cybersecurity frameworks, focusing on compromise indicators and threat actor behaviour rather than singular threats.
Andrei Florescu, vice president of product management at BitDefender Solutions Group, said: “Cybercriminals are increasingly focusing attacks on cloud workloads because that is where data and applications now reside for many organisations.”
