Until now, security teams have needed multiple tools, processes, and even organizational structures to protect their on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments. These silos require deep domain expertise and are costly to support. They also leave teams without holistic visibility and understanding of risk across their entire business. At Wiz we want to simplify and reduce the cost of doing security, and we believe that architectural decisions should not drive cloud security strategy, as private cloud is still a cloud. Today, we are proud to announce that Wiz is extending coverage to VMware vSphere and unifying visibility and security from cloud to ground in a single platform. Now, Wiz customers can pursue the best cloud security strategy for their business and secure it – independent of their architecture.

The most successful organizations recognize that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud is not a strategy on its own, but rather a set of architectural choices that supports their overall cloud and business strategy. A unified approach to cloud security is needed to protect the entire business. One such customer is Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, which uses Wiz to secure their multi-cloud strategy.

There is no private cloud or public cloud, there is just cloud. Bridgewater is in AWS and Azure and we have some VMware racks that will always be there. If our VMware environment is not secure, our public clouds are not secure, and vice versa. With Wiz, our cloud security team can see a unified view of our security posture and know what we need to cover across our entire interconnected environment.

Igor Tsyganskiy, President & CTO, Bridgewater Associates

A new, unified model for cloud security

With VMware support, customers can now connect Wiz to their VMware vSphere environments, private or public, with a 100% API-based approach, offering rapid deployment in minutes. Once connected, Wiz provides a single pane of visibility, risk reduction, and compliance across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. Wiz is also now an accredited VMware Technical Alliance Partner.

With Wiz and VMware vSphere together, customers can connect their self-hosted, AWS VMC and Azure AVS instances:

• Remove vSphere blind spots: Connect once via API to get a full inventory and graph-based visualization of the technologies running in vSphere. Cloud security teams get unified understanding and rich context into formerly siloed areas of their infrastructure.

• Proactively and continuously improve your security posture: Wiz brings the magic of cloud-native security posture management to VMware (VSPM 😊) to detect, prioritize, and remediate misconfigurations based on built-in or custom configuration rules. Further, teams can centrally take control of their misconfigurations with context across their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

• Centralize compliance across any environment: Wiz automates compliance assessments and provides posture scores for the CIS ESXi benchmark along with other industry standard or custom compliance frameworks. You can quickly segment compliance by on-prem or cloud environment, report it to your leadership with confidence, and focus your teams on ensuring best practices.

• Uncover vulnerabilities in vSphere at the speed of the cloud: Continuously assess for vulnerabilities in ESXi and vCenter servers with end-of-life detection without the never-ending hassle of agent enforcement. Focus teams on what’s important by prioritizing remediation with automated correlation with vSphere context. Ensure readiness for the next threat with the Threat Center that immediately identifies exposure across all environments to emerging issues and makes them actionable based on Wiz Research and numerous third-party feeds.

• Centralize definition and enforcement of security policy: Apply a unified policy framework across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to enable security teams to ensure security, compliance, or org-specific requirements are applied business-wide.

Hybrid and multi-cloud are the norm as organizations take a flexible approach to their applications – maintaining them on-prem, lifting and shifting or refactoring them in the cloud, or developing them cloud-natively. Migration takes time and critical legacy applications will reside on-prem for the foreseeable future. Those applications and infrastructure must be secured for the entire cloud environment to be secure. Take for example that 45,000 VMware ESXi servers just reached end-of-life. Teams must be vigilant about upgrading deployments or run the risk of attackers causing severe disruptions to the business.

The Wiz integration with VMWare enhances the visibility, security, and agility that Wiz already brings to cloud teams and unlocks a new, unified model for security that breaks down technology and organizational siloes between on-prem and cloud. By simplifying the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud security, organizations can safely delay refactoring critical apps while speeding up their overall cloud journey. Today, vSphere coverage is in public preview and available for Wiz customers. Disk scanning is currently on the roadmap and will be enabled in a future release. This will allow us to detect vulnerabilities, malware, lateral movement, and data violations in Guest VMs in the future.

To learn more about our integration, check out: https://www.wiz.io/partners/vmware