Cyber attacks are growing in frequency and complexity. And at an average cost of $4.35M¹, data breaches are no joke. With Generative AI, this threat will grow even further—equipping even an unsophisticated attacker with the means to become a sophisticated hacker.

Reality is, you can’t get away with just protecting your perimeter anymore. Today, the most common type of attack vectors—lateral movement, vulnerability exploits and zero day attacks — are all matters of lateral security. And with the majority of your traffic going east-west, protecting the inside of your network is beyond critical.

Traditional security solutions aren’t enough when it comes to lateral security: implemented with multiple appliances, they lead to traffic hairpinning, create bottlenecks, are cost-prohibitive, and only protect a subset of workloads. To make matters worse, they’re blind to VM-to-VM traffic, since traditional methods of using network taps only see traffic between physical hosts. And you can’t protect what you can’t see. 

To protect the inside of your private cloud, you need a comprehensive lateral security solution that gives you complete visibility and security.

VMware’s Lateral Security answers that call; it is distributed, built into the hypervisor, and scales seamlessly to meet your evolving needs. We offer a distributed L7 stateful firewall with advanced threat prevention for zero-trust and compliance initiatives and security intelligence for comprehensive visibility that scales to meet your lateral security needs. Each component of our solution stack works with each other across L2-L7 to simplify and enhance threat detection and prevention. Say goodbye to stitching too many products and trying to make them work together; now you can achieve true operational simplicity with a single, integrated security stack. And—you can manage it all from a centralized point of management. 

The foundation of our solution is segmentation, which is easy to operationalize with tools such as security intelligence that offer AI-driven rule recommendations or with API’s using intent-based policies defined using application tags, making segmentation a powerful tool to combat lateral movement of threats. 

But micro-segmentation alone isn’t enough to protect from advanced threats. Attackers often use social engineering techniques, such as phishing, to gain initial access and move laterally once compromised. To address this, we provide sophisticated advanced threat detection and prevention tools to protect from malicious threat actors. Our network sandbox looks deep inside every artifact and uses advanced AI/ML to detect suspicious files and prevent them from executing. Distributed IDS/IPS will inspect every flow on each host to prevent exploitation of known vulnerabilities. Finally, with Network Traffic Analytics and Network Detection and Response (NTA/NDR) capabilities, we ensure every conversation is inspected to detect suspicious behavior. Comprehensively, these advanced threat prevention capabilities offered by VMware Lateral security protect your private cloud from both known and unknown threats such as vulnerability exploits and zero day attacks. See it in action:

Many of the other industry solutions out there for securing east – west traffic rely on software agents to deliver lateral security. These solutions are high in investment and low in reward. Agent based solutions are hard to operationalize, rely on the host operating system security capabilities such as ip tables, and compete with the workload for CPU resources. These solutions are predominantly limited to segmentation and can’t provide you the depth of features you need to protect from sophisticated threats such as ransomware attacks. VMware Lateral Security is the only scalable software defined distributed security solution that is built into the hypervisor and can detect and protect from advanced threats, offering comprehensive protection for your private cloud. 

With the growing prevalence of Generative AI and large language models (LLMs), it begs the question: is AI friend or foe for security? Well, it depends on how you use it. We sought out a way to use Gen AI to make our solutions better and faster, making your security stronger and easier to deploy. 

We recently introduced Project Cypress, which integrates generative AI into our lateral security solution, which enables you to increase the productivity of your security teams by acting as a co-pilot when investigating threats. With Project Cypress, we are using Gen AI to simplify threat prioritization and accelerate remediation to speed up your time to respond. 

Check out how we’re taking VMware Lateral Security solution to the next level with Gen AI:

We are providing a full stack distributed lateral security solution to protect your environments with zero appliances, zero tickets, and zero taps—offering the best zero trust security solution for your virtualized environment and VCF powered private cloud.

Learn more about how VMware can enhance your organization’s security here. 

Footnotes

(1) 2023 IBM cost of Data Breach Report