Outlook Series | RSA Outlines Vision to Accelerate Virtual Deployments

RSA Outlines Vision to Accelerate Virtual Deployments

March 12, 2010

RSA outlined a strategic vision and a set of solutions and services to help enterprises address the security and compliance of information and identities within VMware environments.

“Organizations that fail to proactively integrate security into their virtualization and private cloud strategies will deny themselves the opportunity to exploit the full value of virtualization,” said Christopher Young, Senior Vice President, Technology of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. “With the offerings we have available today, RSA continues to demonstrate that virtualization can actually improve security and help lead our customers toward 100% virtualization, which will enable a secure journey to the private cloud.”

Many of the security challenges in a virtual infrastructure are similar to those in physical computing environments. One advantage of virtualization is better visibility and control through centralized management, offering IT organizations a more advanced solution for datacenter and endpoint protection. RSA has products and services expertise designed to leverage the key control points within VMware environments to enforce advanced security policy that help protect identities, secure information and monitor infrastructure. As a result, RSA can help organizations ensure their virtual infrastructure can adhere to strict information security policies, support service level agreements and maximize flexibility while minimizing cost and complexity.

Through its ongoing technology development partnership with VMware, RSA has worked to ensure three of its core security products – RSA SecurID strong authentication, the RSA enVision platform and RSA Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Endpoint software – operate within VMware environments. This enables enterprise IT organizations to deploy security and management controls that span both physical and virtual environments with industry-leading RSA products they’ve already invested in.

Technology capabilities delivered by RSA for use in VMware vSphere and VMware View environments include:

Ensure Data Confidentiality: RSA addresses the risk of sensitive data leakage for virtual desktops within the VMware View environment by delivering interoperability with the RSA DLP Suite. Specifically, with RSA DLP Endpoint, administrators can configure data detection policies to discover sensitive information and enforce controls across all workstations and remote laptops in the enterprise from a centralized location.
Monitor Security Events and Demonstrate Compliance: The RSA enVision security information and event management (SIEM) platform now delivers the ability to monitor and report on administrator actions and operational events within both VMware View and VMware vSphere environments to enable organizations to make better security decisions and help maintain policy compliance based on more accurate and timely security intelligence. A new collector has been built within the RSA enVision platform to collect more than 350 events from the VMware platform to deliver these capabilities. RSA enVision SIEM spans physical and virtual environments with the same management, policy and reporting framework to help bring VMware environments under a consistent and centralized set of controls.
Establish Trusted Identities: RSA SecurID two-factor authentication provides an added layer of security to ensure the right user can access the relevant virtual session within the virtual desktop environment. Specifically, RSA SecurID technology is engineered to integrate with VMware View to enable customers to enforce strong authentication to the VMware View portal, VMware vSphere Management Assistant and with the VMware ESX Service Console to protect administrative access.

In addition, the RSA Security Practice of EMC Consulting offers comprehensive advisory and consulting services for virtualized environments. The new services for securing virtual desktop deployments leverage RSA best practices and established safeguards to help build secure virtualized and private cloud environments through technology, policy and program development. (See related EMC news release EMC Expands Security Consulting Services.)

“Our collaboration with RSA helps deliver security policy management at the three fundamental levels of identity, information and infrastructure to help ensure customers’ key enterprise assets remain available, shareable and secure,” said Hatem Naguib, vice president, alliances, VMware. “We now have the opportunity to bake in protection and control enhancements to help customers deploy private cloud environments that provide consistent security up and down the virtual stack.”