The evolution of IT architecture, with the modern datacenter at its heart, has led to fundamental transformation in the business sector. Cloud deployments let organisations capitalise on a flexible and scalable infrastructure and rapidly roll out new applications, products and services. However, modern datacenter environments are also incredibly dynamic. They mark a foundation-shaking move from hardware-defined to software-defined services and applications. They are heterogeneous, and must meet demanding standards of performance and flexibility. In an era marked by mega-breaches, datacenter modernisation introduces security challenges so complex that majority of solutions struggle to address.
More than ever, businesses are using multi-cloud environments to handle an increasing number of workloads as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for core business processes.
Cloud-based business models and time-to-market pressures are forcing chief information security officers (CISOs) to place return-on-investment (ROI) high on their agendas. Struggling to keep up with increasing demands, IT is changing its role from exercising control to providing services that support business objectives. Datacenters can give IT the powerful and flexible compute, storage and network resources needed to succeed. However, modern datacenter workloads also greatly expand the attack surface for cybercriminals, and leave many regulatory compliance gaps to fill.
Hyperconvergence – the backbone of the enterprise cloud
According to IDC, Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest-growing datacenter-infrastructure category, with an estimated compound annual growth of 26.6% from 2016 to 2021. Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and outsourced IT services have become the norm. But what happens when your service provider gets hacked? If 2019 was any indication, hundreds of companies serviced by a single vendor can fall prey to a single hacker group. More worryingly, most of these incidents are targeting the most battered industry – healthcare. It is high time we took a fresh look at securing cloud infrastructures.
Securing next-gen infrastructures
Echoing the manageability benefits of HCI, cloud security must also converge into automated workflows administered from a single place. If we are to stop attacks before they unfold, we need to shorten time-to-protection, simplify security management and enhance visibility. And if we are to maintain operational efficiency, cloud security must also support the other virtues of hyperconvergence, such as efficient linear scalability, higher infrastructure utilisation and undisturbed user experience.
Bitdefender is a leader in cloud workload security (CWS) globally. In 2019, Forrester Research published its inaugural Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security report, evaluating cloud workload security (CWS) providers based on 30 criteria. The research identified Bitdefender as one of the world’s most significant vendors based on key requirements for CWS.
Bitdefender GravityZone offers a new approach to datacenter security. Engineered to safeguard software-defined, hyperconverged and cloud infrastructure, while promoting agility, efficiency and performance. GravityZone is a server- and VDI-workload protection platform that delivers next-generation defenses while facilitating IT agility, operational efficiency and infrastructure-cost containment.
One of its key strengths is the single-console, single-agent approach that unifies security management for physical, virtual and cloud workloads, enabling single-pane-of-glass visibility and consistent policy enforcement across the enterprise cloud.
As one of our flagship customers (Mentor, a Siemens Business) once said: “We have four virtualisation people managing Bitdefender across 15,000 VMs. They are not even the security experts.”
