On Tuesday this week, I was lucky enough to be able to attend TD Synnex’s & VMware’s networking and security day at TD Synnex’s Capitol Building in Bracknell. The day featured various talks from members of both TD Synnex and VMware regarding the following:

TD Synnex

The first talk was around the services and offerings of TD Synnex including some stats on on the key growth areas that they see. One interesting fact is that they see growth in the cybersecurity sector of 52% year on year.

Networking & Security

The next talk was around NSX and described how Vmware’s NSX solution briefly works. Essentially it puts a firewall around each VM with a distributed firewall as well to cover multiple sites. This allows isolation of a VM should it be compromised and prevents lateral movement (movement of attack from one VM to another) of attacks as well as control of traffic between datacenters. It can also providing many other features (dependant on version) such as:

* Load balancing 

* Integrates with vCenter so can be centrally managed

* Multi site coverage, can manage multiple sites from one console

* Network and micro segmentation (isolation of compromised VMs and network traffic)

* IDS (intrusion detection system) and IPS (intrusion prevention system)

* Sandboxing (downloaded files are opened in an emulated environment to see what they do)

* NTA (network traffic analysis) and NDR (network detection and remediation) (tracks east-west traffic and models behaviours of network traffic)

* No physical kit needed, no agents installed and no network changes required

Networking Security For Modern Apps

This talk was around how NSX can be used to provide networking security for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. I’ve not learnt too much around Kubernetes but I get the idea of containerised apps, so this talk went a bit over my head. 

Carbon Black

The final talk was around VMware’s Carbon Black XDR (extended detection and response). This was my first look at Carbon Black and it was good to see the feature set around this product, including:

* Vulnerability management

* Audit & remediation

* Next gen antivirus

* Device Control

* Host based firewall

* Endpoint detection and response

* Network analysis

* Identity intelligence (log inspection)

* Network visibility (what endpoints are doing)

* IDS (intrusion detection system) (identifying malicious behaviour)

* Open system XDR so works with other vendors

* Can deploy with no changes and have instant visibility

Although I’m no cybersecurity expert it was good to see and understand what VMware’s offerings do and how they can help customers secure their networks.