VMblog:  How does your company and product fit within the VMware ecosystem?

Bitdefender:  As a VMware Elite Partner, we have been closely collaborating over the years to bring our award-winning security capabilities to a variety of VMware environments-from vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS to Horizon and NSX-T-while fostering management integration with the underlying platforms to drastically simplify security administration. Our VMware Ready-certified cloud-workload protection platform GravityZone offers VMware customers a single point of security management for their entire hybrid-cloud estate, providing single-pane-of-glass visibility and ensuring security policy consistency across clouds. GravityZone helps VMware users solve the security vs. operational efficiency and infrastructure performance dilemma by maximizing protection, automating security management, and increasing ROI on VMware infrastructure.

VMblog:  We've had the pleasure of connecting at VMworld over the last several years as Bitdefender has been a long-time show sponsor.  What keeps you coming back?

Bitdefender:  We value our ongoing partnership with VMware, and their likeminded commitment to innovation and relentless customer focus. VMworld is a great time to network, and to connect with customers to discuss their latest challenges and how we can help address them.

VMblog:  Tell us about your booth setup and VMworld sponsorship.  What are your plans for this year's show?

Bitdefender:  Bitdefender is a Silver Sponsor and will be at booth #1727 this year. We will be showcasing GravityZone, our award-winning VMware Ready cloud-workload security platform, and two major innovations designed specifically for VMware customers: next-generation agentless security for NSX-T Data Center and security for VMware Cloud on AWS. We will also make an exciting announcement with VMware at the event, so stay tuned!

This year, we are honored to have two VMware guest speakers in our booth: Geoff Wilmington, Sr. Technical Product Manager, NSBU, and Neeharika Palaka, Manager, Business Operations - Cloud Services who will be discussing VMware NSX-T Data Center and VMware Cloud, respectively.

Additionally, on Wednesday, August 28th at 2:50 pm Andrei Florescu, Director of Product Management, and Dan Leming, IT Manager at our valued customer Tyler Technologies will deliver a joint presentation "Streamlining Growth with Efficient Cybersecurity" at the Solution Exchange Theater.

We're once again welcoming magician and presenter Ken Newman, who tells the story of cybersecurity through magic. We'll have demonstrations and hourly presentations at the booth, prizes, and a daily raffle to win a Bitdefender BOX.

VMblog:  What industry challenges or pain points do your showcased solutions address?

Bitdefender:  To set the stage, I would like to quote our valued customer, Tyler Technologies on the problems our cloud-workload protection platform GravityZone has helped them solve: "GravityZone outperformed on all fronts-minimal CPU usage, exceptional threat detection, and streamlined administration. We also like that GravityZone is an end-to-end security suite and integrates well with our large VMware environment."

Several of the specific benefits include:

• Reliable and consistent protection for VMware workloads

GravityZone delivers award-winning layered next-generation defenses such as tunable machine learning, application control, anti-exploit, behavioral analysis, and network sandbox to protect VMware environments from advanced threats, known and unknown.

GravityZone supports VDI and server workloads running in a variety of VMware environments-from vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS to Horizon and NSX-T. In fact, GravityZone is the only security solution on the market that fortifies NSX-based agentless security with tunable machine learning.

By integrating with VMware infrastructure-management tools (VMware NSX Manager on-premises and vCenter Server both on-premises and in VMware Cloud on AWS), GravityZone delivers security-policy consistency, single-pane-of-glass visibility, and infrastructure-aware compliance reporting across the VMware hybrid cloud.

• Efficient and Agile Security Operations

GravityZone protects all enterprise workloads using a single management console that natively integrates with vCenter Server and NSX Manager. This enables rapid roll-out of security services, security-workflow automation and simplified day-to-day administration, cutting time spent on security from days to hours every week. With GravityZone, IT operations teams can focus on customers and strategic IT projects rather than on managing security. 

Another valued Bitdefender customer, Mentor, a Siemens business said of their experience: "We have four virtualization people managing Bitdefender across 15,000 VMs. They're not even the security experts. That's how easy it is to use Bitdefender." 

• Top Infrastructure ROI, Performance and End-User Experience

Engineered for virtualized and cloud environments, GravityZone minimizes security's impact on infrastructure resources, increasing consolidation ratios by up to 55% and improving application response by 36% compared to other security solutions.

-     GravityZone's efficient architecture minimizes the "security performance penalty" via scan offloading, patented two-level caching and efficient antimalware algorithms, enabling higher consolidation ratios, hence better infrastructure ROI

-     By running resource-intensive anti-malware tasks (like scanning) outside of the VMs (on a dedicated security virtual appliance to which these tasks are offloaded), GravityZone avoids competing for system resources with production applications, minimizing latency and jitter in application response. Higher end-user satisfaction ensues.

One of our most tenured customers, BLDD Architects shared: "GravityZone uses minimal computing resources, so it doesn't interfere with system performance or users' productivity." 

VMblog:  What other benefits can VMware customers reap from Bitdefender GravityZone SVE's integration with VMware NSX-T?

Bitdefender:  Bitdefender was the first to deliver agentless security with VMware NSX-T Data Center. With GravityZone, VMware customers can accelerate migration from NSX-V to NSX-T Data Center with workload security readily covered by our VMware-certified solution. Plus, GravityZone is the only solution that fortifies NSX-enabled agentless antimalware scanning with the advanced threat-detection capabilities of HyperDetect tunable machine learning.

VMblog:  What sets your product apart from other VMware partners' solutions?

Bitdefender:  GravityZone excels on several fronts including enabling consistent security and single-pane-of-glass manageability across the hybrid cloud, reducing security's impact on infrastructure performance and end-user experience, and bringing next-generation technologies to the data center.

By delivering a single-console solution covering multiple virtualized and cloud environments, GravityZone provides the visibility, policy-enforcement uniformity and consolidated reporting that are unachievable with other solutions. In VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, for example, GravityZone automatically applies consistent, VM-appropriate policies based on vCenter Server inventory objects, including both on-premises and VMC on AWS instances.

Security's impact on infrastructure utilization and performance is an important concern as it directly affects costs and end-user experience. GravityZone fills this gap by offloading antimalware overhead to a virtual appliance and using proprietary two-layer caching techniques and heuristics to minimize the amount of CPU, memory and other resources required to run security. These approaches help customers increase VM density by up to 55% and reduce latency by up to 36% compared to other solutions.

Finally, GravityZone uniquely brings tunable machine learning to NSX environments to address growing concerns about recent threats such as ransomware and cryptojacking attacks.

VMblog:  What is your number one message to both VMworld attendees and those who won't be able to make the show this year?

Bitdefender:  Regardless of what VMware workloads you run and where you run them, Bitdefender GravityZone delivers the most effective protection, while freeing up your IT and infrastructure resources to run strategic projects and revenue-generating workloads.

VMblog:  Can you talk a bit about the future of cloud and virtualization?  Where do you think the industry is headed?

Bitdefender:  It has become clear over the last several years that despite the explosive growth in public-cloud IaaS adoption, enterprise computing will remain hybrid for the foreseeable future. For example, Forrester® reports in its "Adoption Profile: Public Cloud In North America, Q2 2018" that 84% of public-cloud users also have a private cloud. From the strategic, economic, and privacy points of view, hybrid makes sense for the enterprise. Among the plethora of internal and customer-facing applications that large enterprises run, there will always be some that are better suited for private, some for public, and some for migrating across clouds at various stages of their lifecycle.

Multi-cloud is the new emerging trend in enterprise infrastructure, with most organizations planning or deploying several public and / or private clouds. The 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report shows, for example, that 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy and, on average, organizations are using or experimenting with a mind-boggling sum-total of 4.9 clouds. This creates complexity both from the infrastructure-management and security standpoints. Our focus at Bitdefender has been to support customers as they embrace the multi-cloud world. Our cloud-workload protection platform, GravityZone, has been engineered to provide single-pane-of-glass visibility into all clouds an enterprise runs, enabling efficient and consistent enforcement of security policies-whether servers or virtual desktops operate in private or public clouds or migrate between them.