VMware buys Carbon Black:
What does this mean for data security?
VMware stroke a $2.1 billion deal to buy cloud-based endpoint-security developer Carbon Black. The agreement creates a new security business unit that will innovate in cybersecurity and data analytics to protect cloud and network company resources.
When VMware announced the deal was in the works, CEO Pat Gelsinger said Carbon Black technology would be integrated into the VMware family of products such as NSX Networking and vSphere, VMware’s virtualization stand.
VMware software backs complex digital structure. Its cloud, networking and security system and, most of all, its digital workspace provide a sound and dynamic digital base for customers all around the world by an innovative, ever-growing ecosystem of business partners.
As of today, Carbon Black was one of those partners but now is part of the VMware family. Carbon Black is a leader in cloud-native protection, keeping organizations’ data safe from cyberattacks. Its Predictive Security Cloud is the base of endpoint protection and operations into an EPP that thwarts cutting-edge threats and helps businesses easing their services. Its system helps them analyze millions of security threats and events every day, which leads them to have a significant insight over attacker’s behavior so their customers are able to identify, answer and detain incoming attacks.
Including Carbon Black’s flagship offerings –a cloud-founded endpoint safety system that uses network and data to prevent threats and trigger security answers in the system, will be vital for VMware’s future. In 2017 the companies had already struck a deal to improve VMware’s AppDefense, and that’s where VMware expects to continue heading.
“Security is broken and fundamentally customers want a different answer in the security space. We think this move will be an opportunity for major disruption,” Gelsinger said about the deal.
How the deal changes and improves VMware? They created a unit on security that will be led by Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley, who said that “VMware has a vision to create a modern security platform for any app, running on any cloud, delivered to any device – essentially, to build security into the fabric of the compute stack. Carbon Black’s cloud-native platform, our ability to see and stop attackers by leveraging the power of our rich data and behavioral analytics, and our deep cybersecurity expertise are all truly differentiating.”
VMware has a history of cybersecurity shortcomings that Carbon Black will palliate with its cloud-based platform. But that’s not everything. Carbon Black can help the company take a step forward, providing an integrated secure cloud-based workspace. This is, for example, what Microsoft does with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection.
This means that VMware is now able to protect a system with a complete threat detection and response offer thanks to the acquisition of Veriflow and its star product, yRealize, a hybrid cloud (a mix of public and private cloud) management system.
Certainly, Carbon Black doesn’t support cloud workload security, but this deal aims to do so as soon as the first few months of 2020.
Carbon Black will focus on improving VMware products’ capacity to collect and analyze fundamental endpoint data to understand how attackers behave and leading the system to offer automated responses against these attacks. This new capacity widens VMware customer reach with enhanced security against the most complex and subtle cyberattacks.
About this part of the deal, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware said that “Carbon Black brings us an industry-leading endpoint and workload security platform, with a cloud-native architecture, an AI-powered data lake and a smart, lightweight agent.”
“The Carbon Black platform, along with VMware NSX, VMware Workspace ONE, VMware Secure State and our future innovations, will deliver a highly-differentiated intrinsic security platform across network, endpoint, workload, identity, cloud and analytics.”