VMware Unveils Service-Defined Firewall at RSA Conference

VMware moved deeper in the security sector at the RSA Conference, unveiling an internal firewall it calls a Service-defined Firewall. The product combines the capabilities of VMware’s NSX virtualization platform, which provides network and application visibility, and its first security product App Defense, which protects workloads by monitoring them against their intended state. And it adds automated and adaptive firewall capabilities to the mix. It works with bare metal, virtual machine (VM), and container-based application environments, and will support hybrid cloud environments such as VMware Cloud on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and AWS Outposts in the future. It’s a “true firewall,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking and security business unit. “It’s not port blocking. We have stateful, Layer 7 inspection of the network connection. We have the advanced inspection of the host itself. And it’s coupled with automatic generation of the firewall rules based on this knowledge and understanding of how the application behaves.”