Hello again, Citrix community!
Welcome to the second installment in our mini-series highlighting what’s new in XenServer 7.1.
In part one of this series, we discussed how XenServer’s industry-leading support for virtual graphics is reinforcing Citrix position at the forefront of virtualization technology. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at security; in particular, the latest in advanced security technology designed to identify and prevent potential threats to system and data integrity before they cause significant harm to a company’s business.
As one of the newest and most advanced security technologies on the market today, Hypervisor Introspection (HVI) offers organizations a unique approach to fighting malicious activity within their datacenters. By providing raw memory introspection at the hypervisor level, HVI enables IT administrators to dramatically improve the security of their infrastructures against targeted attacks.
Unique features of HVI:
- Blocks targeted attacks in real time, directly at hypervisor level
- Cannot be reached or eluded by malware
- Fast and accurate, focuses on attack techniques
- Introduces no discernible impact to VM performance
- Co-exists/complements existing security layers
- Agentless – no software components need to be installed in guest operating systems
- Adaptive – detects and helps IT admins. respond rapidly to sophisticated attacks
Working together, Citrix and Bitdefender®, a security industry pioneer whose technology secures the digital experience of 500 million home and corporate users across the globe, recently developed an innovative security layer that effectively fights targeted attacks in order to maintain system and data integrity and keep an organization’s datacenter safe.
Utilizing XenServer 7 Direct Inspect APIs integrated within the Xen hypervisor, Bitdefender’s HVI module adds a revolutionary security layer to a virtualized infrastructure — rooting out data breaches and deep malware frequently missed by endpoint security mechanisms — to prevent major disruptions to an organization’s business.
The “secret sauce” behind Bitdefender HVI is its unique ability to scan raw memory directly at the hypervisor layer, thereby enabling it to detect memory-based threats. With this approach, targeted attacks can be blocked before they have a chance to impact one’s IT infrastructure. HVI can also insert a temporary remediation tool within an affected virtual machine automatically to quickly remove intrusions before they inflict any damage.
Hosted inside a Security Virtual Appliance, HVI is compatible with other security solutions already running in a company’s IT infrastructure. Since HVI is an agentless solution, IT administrators can protect virtual machines without having to install and manage additional security components inside guest operating systems. This approach simplifies both deployment and operation while ensuring minimal performance impact.
Offering advanced detection, prevention and remedial capabilities, Citrix customers deploying XenApp and XenDesktop on XenServer with Bitdefender HVI can feel confident their business-critical applications, systems and data are well-protected from the most sophisticated attacks against their organization’s IT infrastructure. Click here to see HVI in action.
In part three of this mini-series we’ll look at the newly integrated PVS Caching feature in XenServer 7.1, also known as “PVS-Accelerator,” which offers further proof the Citrix “Better Together” concept is delivering significant value to our customers.
Until next week!
Andy
