Trend Micro announced at VMworld last week a new version of its Deep Security suite to offer protection across both physical and virtual servers and desktops. Trend purchased this software last year from Third Brigade, and the new version is a significant upgrade in that it consolidates protection across both physical and virtual platforms and does so with a combination of agent-based and agentless solutions. The goal is to protect your data from end-to-end, and they mostly succeed.
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Trend has added to their agentless protection for VMs to include file integrity monitoring; previous versions had agentless anti-malware and intrusion prevention too. It is also one of the first to make use of Intel’s trusted protection management chip features (if the chip is present on the host machine) so that when a hypervisor is compromised, alerts will be created. Most VM protection products operate on just the VMs themselves: this doesn’t help matters if the hypervisor is compromised. See the diagram below:
The agentless anti-virus scanner requires VMware’s vShield Endpoint to be installed and only works on certain Windows VMs. It will also work with the newer vShield version 5 when it comes out later this year. You’ll need agents for physical server malware protection though.
Deep Security has beefed up its VDI protection so they are secure as move outside and back into the data center.
In addition to the new version of Deep Security, Trend Micro also announced last week at VMworld SecureCloud v2. The two work together to respond to the constantly evolving state of the datacenter and share security status information so that any server requesting access to encrypted data has up-to-date protection before encryption keys are released. Trend has done a better job integrating the two in terms of security policies and management tasks as well.
SecureCloud is delivered as a convenient hosted SaaS solution under a free two-month trial or as an on-premise software application.
Deep Security starts at $1000 per server, with volume discounts available. Secure Cloud starts at $1300 per managed encryption key and bundles with Deep Security will be announced later by Trend.
If you can’t wait until year-end to try either product, you can take a look at an in-depth comparison review of an earlier version of Trend’s Deep Security with four other VM security technologies that I did earlier this year for Network World.
