We have gone around this so many times with our clients and are relieved to announce that Citrix and McAfee are collaborating on developing a VDI aware security product – surely this will drive adoption.
The collaboration between the two leaders in security and virtualisation will enable Citrix XenDesktop customers to extend management of desktop security to virtual environments using the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator platform. The partnership is the direct result of growing customer demand for integrated security management in large-scale enterprise deployments of desktop virtualisation. The combination is expected to address the need to provide granular endpoint security policies for each virtual desktop while also addressing scalability, performance and complexity challenges that arise from virtualisation.
As part of the solution, Citrix plans to collaborate with McAfee to develop security solutions for VDI-based virtual desktops that centralise all virus scanning and virus signature file updates, off-loading the processing intensive actions from the individual VMs. The goal of this solution is to enhance the security and scalability of virtual desktop deployments by reducing CPU, memory and storage requirements, and to simplify desktop security and lifecycle management. The results of the collaboration are planned for release late in the second half of 2010 and will be designed to secure XenDesktop deployments on any of the three leading hypervisors -- Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX.
In addition, McAfee and Citrix are collaborating to develop hypervisor-native detection capabilities into Citrix XenClient and Citrix XenServer, that will deliver a quantum leap forward in endpoint security. The hypervisor will play a first-class role in protecting and detecting security policy violations for virtual machines. These industry-first capabilities for hypervisor-native detection will also be contributed to Xen.org, together with an open security API. The McAfee(R) Management for Optimised Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform will take advantage of these enhanced hypervisor-native capabilities, making it easier to provide security by performing run-time checks on the integrity of each virtual machine. The collaboration will enable the Xen ecosystem broadly, including Xen-based clouds, to offer endpoint security services as a native property of the virtual infrastructure.
dataplex spoke on this subject at Infosec the other week, need help with this? Contact us here mailto:cb@dplex.co.uk