General29.07.2013

Unsecured virtualized and cloud environments can be a threat to business

Securing your virtual environment can cost you two thirds less with agentless security solutions

As virtualized and cloud infrastructure are changing the face of today’s datacentres so too are they changing the way in which we need to approach the security of our IT infrastructures.

According to Gregory Anderson, South African country manager at Trend Micro, throwing a mix of yesterday’s legacy security technologies at today’s IT landscape can open one’s business to serious threats. This can have disastrous effects, impacting performance, increasing complexity and opening gaping holes in one’s security policies.

“The reason organisations and IT professionals are still wary of investing into virtualization and the cloud is very much hinged around the security debate,” states Anderson. “Agentless solutions, such as our Deep Security 9 products, offer what we term “better-than-physical” protection, where a single platform integrates all security technologies and in turn is able to resolve any operational issues that may arise in the virtual environment.”

According to Anderson agent-based security solutions remain limited in what they are able to deliver, whereas agentless appliances can simplify your overall security landscape with particular relevance to accelerating the ROI of cloud-based and virtualized environments.

The agentless nature of Deep Security 9 provides its users with a lighter, more manageable way to secure VMs to help them make the most out of their virtualization and cloud investments. To this end it also strengthens security without additional footprint through agentless integrity monitoring, intrusion prevention, firewall and anti-malware and frees staff from continually configuring, updating, and patching agents. It also protects virtual servers and virtual desktops as they move between datacentre and public cloud.

“Our agentless Deep Security 9 solution is proven to cut the costs of securing your virtual environment by two thirds. So as an example if you were to hypothetically pay 100,000 on an agent, you would only require 30,000 to secure the same environment when using Trend Micro’s agentless technologies. This has been substantiated by recent research and testing performed by the Tolly Group,” adds Anderson.

A major benefit when applying the agentless power of Deep Security 9 in your environment is that you don’t have to rip out and replace your existing security environment. Additionally you can customise and tailor your security environment to include a combination of agentless and agent-based protection, including anti-malware, web reputation, firewall, intrusion prevention, integrity monitoring, and log inspection.

The result is an adaptive and efficient server security platform that protects mission-critical enterprise applications and data from breaches and business disruptions without expensive emergency patching.

“Ultimately an agentless security solution within your virtualized, cloud-based and VM environment will enable you to maximise efficiency and reduce operational costs with lower overheads; it will also allow for greater machine consolidation in virtual environments; eliminates the cost of deploying multiple software clients; provide vulnerability protection and reduce security management costs. In short it’s a win-win solution, taking away the trepidation of moving into the cloud and paving the way for businesses to move into the future,” he ends.

 

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