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VMware Announces New Security APIs for Partners

VMware on Thursday announced VMsafe, new security application programming interfaces (APIs) that, according to the company, will allow its partners to develop security solutions for virtualized applications "in ways previously not possible in physical environments."

"VMware already has the most trusted virtualization platform for running applications, and we are now raising the bar on security in ways that physical systems simply cannot match," Raghu Raghuram, VMware's vice president of datacenter products and solutions, said in a released statement announcing VMsafe. "The industry has come out in full force to support VMware VMsafe technology with plans for a whole new class of security products that offer customers new advantages to running applications in virtual machines."

According to VMware, because of VMsafe's VMware hypervisor-based architecture, "[s]ecurity products built on VMsafe technology are able to stop malware before it harms a machine or steals data, including the latest generation of rootkits, trojans and viruses, which are undetectable on physical machines," the company said.

Some of the 20 partners who will be releasing VMsafe-supported applications include Symantec, Fortinet, Catbird, Secure Computing, Shavlik, IBM, Trend Micro, RSA, F5 and McAfee.

"VMware will enable Catbird to extend our reach to an even deeper level of security and policy enforcement to help protect virtual environments from mismanagement and attack," commented Edmundo Costa, chief executive officer for Catbird Inc., in the same statement.

"With VMsafe, customers can achieve with virtualization, what was virtually impossible before in the physical world," said Mandeep Khera, vice president of marketing at Cenzic Inc., another VMsafe partner. "Integration of our application security solution Cenzic Hailstorm ARC with VMware Lab Manager and VMware VirtualCenter solutions have helped us dramatically change the rules of the game...Before this integration, this level of risk management wasn't feasible in the physical world, mainly due to cost, convenience and time factors."

About the Author

Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Enterprise Computing and Education Groups, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital strategy for the groups. She also serves as executive editor the ECG Web sites, and you'll even find her byline on PureAI.com, the ECG group's newest site for enterprise developers working with AI. She recently gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web technology may impact publishers' bottom lines. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.