I’ve been doing some updates to Chapter 23 of the eucbook – which I released with my co-author, Barry Coombs last year. The updates are ones that are centered around Chapter 13 which concerns the use of VMware’s vShield End-point solution. In case you don’t know this uses a management appliance (vShield Manager) together with 3rd party vendor (in my case Bitdefender) to offload the payload of AV protection away from your virtual desktops. Bitdefender has recently restructured their offering into what is called “GravityZone” which allows for protection of not just virtuals but physicals from their Control Center – interestingly it also supports the protection of mobile devices too.
Bitdefender GravityZone is the first security management solution to properly address the scalability and performance challenges that enterprises are facing today. Built from the ground up for heterogeneous environments, and using a unique design approach, GravityZone unifies control for virtualized, physical, and mobile endpoints. Organizations have the flexibility to deploy any or all of the three security services within GravityZone: Security for Virtualized Environments, Security for Endpoints, and Security for Mobile Devices.
Optimizing security management for the realities of cloud computing, virtualization, or BYOD is possible through innovation. The GravityZone approach provides organizations with a range of benefits including improved operations, simplified security workflows, increased performance, and reduced administrative efforts and costs. These are achieved through:
- Accelerated deployment by simply importing a virtual appliance
- Massive scalability – from the smallest to the largest installation, without performance issues
- Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, VMware vCenter, and Citrix XenServer for simplified deployment of physical and virtual endpoints
- Unified administration that eliminates point solutions and reduces administrative efforts
I figured there were enough changes to warrant spending my weekends updating the content.
Anyway, I’m free say that this chapter is now FREE to download (so no need to purchase the book). In conjunction with this promotion, Bitdefender have very kindly offered an extended 3-month evaluation for those in the community who want a chance to kick the tires of Endpoint – remember its now part and parcel of the vSphere release. I have 50 of these promotions available – and the first 50 qualify for PSO support.
