Bitdefender Launches Solution to Protect Virtualized Environments

Bitdefender today announced the availability of its new security solution specifically designed to protect virtualized data centers.

Dubbed “Bitdefender Security for Virtualized Environments” (SVE), the solution is a comprehensive security offering architected for deployment in heterogeneous datacenters. The product was designed to protect environments running VMware or any other major virtualization plarform, including hypervisors from Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM and Red Hat® Enterprise Virtualization running Windows, Linux, and Solaris. When installed in VMware environments, SVE works with VMware’s vShield Endpoint, technology that offloads anti-malware agent processing to a dedicated virtual appliance.

Orginally unveiled in late August, SVE’s availability was annouced today at VMworld 2011 Europe. SecurityWeek had the opportunity preview Bitdefender’s Security for Virtualized Environments at a recent media event hosted by the company in Romania.

The solution protects both virtualized servers and desktop systems running Windows, Linux, and Solaris systems and offers a number of benefits and features to enterprises, the most valuable being the ability to centralize scanning functions, ultimately enabling higher consolidation ratios.

By centralizing security scanning functions on a Linux-based virtual appliance, the solution effectively deduplicates anti-malware load associated with updates, management, and scanning. Simply put, the solution can scan multiple VM’s from via a single scanning engine, as opposed to having a scanning engine running on each VM which can consume CPU and significantly degrade performance across the entire host, especially during updates and full system scans. (Right)

SVE is built on the company’s new “Gravity Architecture” which also power its Cloud Security for Endpoints solution and enables centralized management of multiple Bitdefender security products. By building the new architecture around virtual containers, large enterprises and service providers can offer their customers scalable security solutions.

“As organizations increase consolidation ratios in datacenters, products that have been designed specifically to address security in virtual environments are playing a critical role,” said Bogdan Dumitru, Bitdefender’s CTO.

“We are pleased to have Bitdefender as one of our first partners to launch a commercial solution that integrates with our latest VMware vShield Endpoint™ security technology,” said Parag Patel, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “The combination of virtualization and security expertise of VMware and Bitdefender will deliver ongoing value to our customers by offloading key antimalware functions to a security virtual machine for improved performance.”

Licensed on either a per CPU basis or the number of Virtual Machines protected, Security for Virtualized Environments brings flexible licensing that includes all security modules with no additional costs.