This morning we woke to a couple of announcements from VMWare, first VMware on AWS is available on a By-The-Hour basis and also the new AppDefense security offering. At the main session, Pat welcomes a crowd of 20k+ participants and takes a minute to ask for help in any way to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. Every day across everything we do, touch, and see technology is changing the way we experience our surroundings. Changes in technology aim to create higher value jobs, not about bringing old jobs back. VMware’s vision of any device, any application, any cloud spans across all aspects of our life is now more pertinent with things like IoT, and it tries to get the users and apps closer and closer by delivering those apps in a simple but secure way. When listening to Capital One

By listening to Capital One, we can confirm that most companies now technology companies. That their business could be banking, food or marketing, but every company has to be a technology company to be able to reach the users in more efficient ways.  From VMware’s https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws we get what is VMware Cloud on AWS: “VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables you to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services.” Some of the use cases for this new offering are:

1. Test and Development: without a massive capital investment you can start working in little time on new projects.
2. Migrate applications on-prem to off-prem and back, use this to grow only when needed and pay only for that time.

The pricing at this stage is as On Demand and pay only for what you use, later more offerings will be available.

The new security offering, AppDefense, is based on the NSX software defined networking platform. A new approach is needed to protect the apps and data. AppDefense is application focused, and it will identify and capture the behavior of the application, in this way it will be able to determine problems with it. After detecting anomalies, it will also be able to take actions (automated) depending on what is happening. This process is called “Capture Good”. One neat topic that came up is Cyber Hygiene. VMware published a new paper on it, and these are what VMware calls the five pillars:

1. Least Privilege
2. Micro-Segmentation
3. Encryption
4. Multi-Factor Authentication
5. Patching

You can find the paper here.

NSX is the key that glues it all together. I’ve been coming to VMworld for three years now, and every year I meet more and more people with NSX as part of their environments. It all answers to the need of agility and rapid growth. I’ve heard this too many times now: go fast or it will pass by you.