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Few technologies have had the transformative influence of cloud services, laying the groundwork for the next generation of apps and insights, but it’s come at a cost for security teams.
Today’s cloud-native, public cloud, and hybrid cloud environments are more complex than ever before to the point where security teams are having struggle to secure them.
For instance, in the State of Cloud Security 2021 report, researchers found that 98% of organizations reported having at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months, with 67% reporting three or more incidents.
In an attempt to offer organizations greater support in maintaining their cloud security, VMware today has announced the release of advanced workload protection for AWS to help offer AWS customers better visibility over on-premises and cloud environments.
The new solution, VMware Carbon Black Workload, will automatically gather and list vulnerabilities in AWS environments, while providing a next-generation antivirus (NGAV) to analyze attackers’ behavior patterns, while providing endpoint detection and response capabilities.
Deepening visibility into the cloud
As adoption of cloud services has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, more organizations have found that they lack the internal skills to secure their cloud-facing environments.
Research from Ermetic released today found that 80% of companies report they lack a dedicated security team for protecting cloud resources from threats.
When combined with previous findings that 86% of companies experience a skills gap for implementing cloud technologies, it’s unsurprising that organizations lack the internal resources necessary to secure these complex environments.
The best way to remedy this situation is to give security teams greater visibility over what’s going on.
”By enabling security teams to see workloads that are ephemeral and transient in nature, VMware Carbon Black Workload for AWS proves authoritative context to help AWS customers better secure cloud workloads,” said vice president of product management and co-general manager for VMware’s security business unit, Jason Rolleston.
“Automatic gathering and listing of vulnerabilities helps identify risk and harden workloads to shrink the attack surface, while CI/CD packages for sensor deployment further simplify sensor lifecycle management,” Rolleston said.
By automatically generating a list of vulnerabilities, security teams will be able to have a better understanding of their exposure to threat actors, and will be able to discover ways to optimize their defenses.
The global cloud workload protection market
The announcement comes as the global cloud workload protection market is expected to grow from a value of $4.79 billion in 2021 to reach $28.39 billion by 2029 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.9% as more organizations look to enhance their cloud security posture.
As one of the leading desktop-as-a-service and virtual machine providers in the market, VMware’s release of a workload protection for AWS has the potential to assist a wide range of enterprises that are looking to secure their cloud environments.
However, VMware is competing against other cloud workload protection providers like Trend Micro with Trend Micro Cloud One, which offers a workload security solution that automatically protects new and existing workloads. Trend Micro also recently announced earning annual recurring revenue of over $550 million last year.
Another significant competitor is Palo Alto Networks‘ Prisma Cloud, a cloud workload protection solution designed to protect hosts, containers and serverless applications and manage vulnerabilities through a dashboard view. Palo Alto Networks recently announced raising third-quarter revenue of $1.4 billion.
The main differentiator between VMware’s solution and competitors is its use of VMware Context, the organization’s security threat intelligence cloud.
“With enterprise threat-hunting for workloads that includes behavioral EDR, AWS customers can turn threat intelligence into a prevention policy to avoid hunting for the same threat twice. This telemetry feeds into VMware Context to shrink the gap between attackers and defenders while enabling greater visibility, control and anomaly detection for workloads,” Rolleston said.