VMware Unveils Project Northstar, Trinidad and Watch in Multi-Cloud Networking and Security Push

VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) has added a set of new capabilities to its growing networking and security portfolio, which the company says will help customers adopt the cloud operating model. The additions are:

• Project Northstar, covering multi-cloud networking and security together with end-to-end visibility;

• network detection and visibility built into Carbon Black Cloud, the company's endpoint protection platform, now open in early access;

• Project Trinidad, which extends and develops VMware's API security and analytics;

• Project Watch, a new take on multi-cloud networking and security that offers advanced policy controls between applications.

Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's Networking and Advanced Security business group, said enterprises working across multiple clouds now face threats and complexity on a scale they have not seen before. In his account, VMware is fundamentally changing the way customers consume networking and security, giving them the agility and efficiency of the cloud operating model through what the company calls a cloud-smart approach. He pointed to VMware's privileged position in the infrastructure and its scale-out distributed software architecture as what allows it to build on the built-in properties of its platforms and sell these products on a consumption basis.

Northstar brings NSX services to a single cloud console

Project Northstar, released as a technology preview, is a major step forward for the NSX platform, and VMware expects it to change how enterprises buy and run networking and security across clouds. It will offer multi-cloud networking, security, workload mobility and end-to-end threat detection and response from one central cloud console, so the services can be consumed as software-as-a-service (SaaS) in a consistent and simpler way. The family covers network and security policy management, network detection and response (NDR), network visibility and analytics (NSX Intelligence), advanced load balancing (ALB) and workload mobility (HCX), for both private cloud environments and VMware Cloud deployments.

Umesh Mahajan, senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security business unit, described VMware as an innovator in software-defined networking whose integrated, full-stack set of networking and security services is already used by thousands of enterprise customers. According to Mahajan, customers want a single policy model across their multi-cloud deployments, with consistent connectivity, security and load balancing, and Project Northstar is how VMware intends to keep shaping the way they get those services.

With the newest releases, VMware NSX 4.0 and VMware vSphere 8, NSX networking and security functions can also run on Data Processing Units (DPUs, also called SmartNICs) attached to the host hypervisor. Moving NSX services onto the DPU speeds up networking and security work without drawing on the host CPUs, which suits modern applications and others that are network-heavy or sensitive to latency.

More visibility into lateral movement

As more threats move sideways through a network, security teams need to watch east-west traffic more closely, and inspecting it through network taps is no longer enough. Modern distributed cloud architectures can make the blind spots worse. VMware says its architecture lets customers see the processes running on an endpoint, the packets moving across the network, access points and the internals of both traditional and modern applications, so they can spot and stop threats that other tools miss.

To build on that, VMware is embedding network detection and visibility into the Carbon Black Cloud endpoint protection platform, available now in early access to selected customers. This extended detection and response (XDR) telemetry brings network detection and visibility to endpoints without any change to infrastructure or to the endpoints themselves, giving customers a wider view across endpoints and networks and, in the company's words, leaving attackers nowhere to hide.

Modern applications face extra risk because there is little visibility into traffic flowing east-west between microservices. Project Trinidad, in technology preview, addresses this by placing sensors on Kubernetes clusters and applying machine learning with business logic inference to flag unusual behaviour in that traffic.

VMware's recent Global Incident Response Threat Report found that ransomware groups keep refining their cyber extortion tactics, and the company expects ransomware to remain a fact of business life. Its answer is VMware Ransomware Recovery for VMware Cloud DR, a new ransomware recovery-as-a-service product unveiled at VMware Explore, which it says makes recovery quicker, more predictable and less error-prone. The service recovers IT and line-of-business production workloads safely and without re-infection by using an isolated recovery environment on VMware Cloud on AWS, created on demand. Guided workflows help customers find candidate recovery points quickly, check restore points with built-in behavioural analysis and bring data back with minimal loss.

Protection at the data centre and cloud edge

A year earlier VMware had introduced what it called the industry's first elastic application security edge (EASE), letting networking and security infrastructure at the data centre or cloud edge adapt as application needs shift. For customers who want to protect what they have spent on costly hardware appliances that cannot keep up with changing application environments, the company is adding:

• VMware NSX Gateway Firewall. The next-generation firewall gains stateful active-active edge scale-out, which substantially raises throughput for stateful services. It now also provides advanced threat prevention (IDPS, malware analysis, sandboxing, URL filtering, TLS proxy, stateful firewall and stateful Network Address Translation) that carries centralised security controls to physical and virtual workloads at the data centre and cloud edge.

• VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer. Aiming to put multi-layer application security at the edge, near applications and users, for efficiency and performance, NSX ALB adds bot management and strengthens its web application firewall, malware detection, security analytics and DDoS protection. VMware says this helps customers keep a consistent and simple security posture as protection extends from traditional applications to cloud-native container-based ones across multiple clouds. Because NSX ALB can enforce API security policies in line with application delivery traffic, it also helps protect north-south APIs.

• Project Watch. Unveiled at VMware Explore 2022 as a technology preview, Project Watch applies advanced app-to-app policy controls to support continuous risk and compliance assessment. It is designed to let network security and compliance teams observe, assess and dynamically reduce risk and compliance issues in composite multi-cloud applications on an ongoing basis.

SASE for distributed workers and Cross-Cloud services

Over the previous two years, enterprises have fundamentally rethought how they build networks and provide access for distributed employees. Dell'Oro Group expects the secure access service edge (SASE) market to almost triple by 2026, with security a major driver as companies invest for distributed applications and hybrid work. VMware, which counts itself a leader in SD-WAN, is adding web proxy-based connectivity to VMware Cloud Web Security. This gives customers more deployment options if they want to move in several phases from their current network and endpoint management tools to a next-generation SASE offering.

At VMware Explore 2022 the company also presented new and upgraded VMware Cross-Cloud services, meant to give customers freedom, flexibility and security across multiple clouds. The portfolio is designed as one simpler way to build, run, reach and better secure any application on any cloud from any device, and rests on five pillars: App Platform, Cloud Management, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure, Security and Networking, and Anywhere Workspace.