Unsecured cloud environments can be a threat to business

According to Gregory Anderson, South African country manager of Trend Micro, throwing a mix of yesterday's legacy security technologies at today's IT landscape can open one's business to serious threats. This can have disastrous effects, impacting on performance, increasing complexity and opening gaping holes in one's security policies.

"The reason why organisations and IT professionals are still wary of investing into virtualisation and the cloud is very much hinged around the security debate," stated Anderson. "Agentless solutions, such as our Deep Security 9 products, offer what we term "better than physical" protection, where a single platform integrates all security technologies and, in turn, is able to resolve any operational issues that may arise in the virtual environment."

According to Anderson, agent-based security solutions remain limited in what they are able to deliver, whereas agentless appliances can simplify your overall security landscape with particular relevance to accelerating the ROI of cloud-based and virtualised environments.

A lighter, more manageable way to secure VMs

The agentless nature of Deep Security 9 provides its users with a lighter, more manageable way to secure VMs to help them make the most out of their virtualisation and cloud investments. To this end, it also strengthens security without additional footprint through agentless integrity monitoring, intrusion prevention, firewall and anti-malware, and frees staff from continually configuring, updating, and patching agents. It also protects virtual servers and virtual desktops as they move between data centre and public cloud.

"Our agentless Deep Security 9 solution is proven to cut the costs of securing your virtual environment by two-thirds. So, as an example, if you were to hypothetically pay R100,000 on an agent, you would only require R30,000 to secure the same environment when using Trend Micro's agentless technologies. This has been substantiated by recent research and testing performed by the Tolly Group," added Anderson.

A major benefit when applying the agentless power of Deep Security 9 in your environment is that you don't have to rip out and replace your existing security environment. Additionally, you can customise and tailor your security environment to include a combination of agentless and agent-based protection, including anti-malware, web reputation, firewall, intrusion prevention, integrity monitoring, and log inspection.

The result is an adaptive and efficient server security platform that protects mission-critical enterprise applications and data from breaches and business disruptions without expensive emergency patching.

"Ultimately, an agentless security solution within your virtualised, cloud-based and VM environment will enable you to maximise efficiency and reduce operational costs with lower overheads; it will also allow for greater machine consolidation in virtual environments; eliminates the cost of deploying multiple software clients; provide vulnerability protection and reduce security management costs. In short it's a win-win solution, taking away the trepidation of moving into the cloud and paving the way for businesses to move into the future," he ended.