Guest blog post by Andra Mihaela Cazacu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Bitdefender, which presented at Citrix Summit ’19.
Another year is behind us, and unfortunately, there have been plenty of security incidents to mark its passing. After the monumental Equifax breach, which disclosed sensitive information of nearly 150 million people, the outlook for 2018 was far from positive. Even so, our expectations were still surpassed by Facebook’s massive breach, which affected almost 50 million user accounts, enabled attackers to see a victim’s profile, and forced Facebook to log off almost 90 million users to limit the impact.
What Threatens Cloud Workloads in 2019?
At this year’s Citrix Summit, Bitdefender presented about the dangers that lie ahead for organizations in 2019, particularly as they transition to the cloud.
Visitors to the Bitdefender booth learned about cryptojacking, one of the biggest threats of 2018, which can sneak into infrastructures to feed off CPUs’ or GPUs’ computing power to mine for cryptocurrencies. They also saw how ransomware has evolved to become more targeted and more effective and found out more about the notorious GandCrab campaign, which caused losses of over $300 million dollars from February to July alone.
How to Achieve Next-Gen Security Without Impacting Operations or Performance
As much as we strive to offer best-of-breed security to our networks, most security solutions were built for traditional infrastructure and have trouble coping with the new hybrid, multi-cloud mix that we are transitioning to today. Third-party LoginVSI testing shows how even reputable security platforms could impact consolidation ratios of up to 30 percent and reduce app response time by as much as 20 percent. Managing a comprehensive security stack can also be a headache, with multiple agents deployed on machines, multiple consoles to manage, cloud, on-premises, or even the security solution’s inability to correctly license non-persistent VDIs.
What’s the Secret to Remain Compliant, Safeguard Data, and Streamline Operations?
Virtualization leaders such as Citrix have long been working with security vendors such as Bitdefender to natively integrate a security solution into the virtualization stack and provide customers with the ability to run state-of-the-art security without compromising operational excellence.
Bitdefender has integrated its GravityZone™ cloud workload security platform to tightly integrate with Citrix environments for many years and has developed a close relationship with Citrix. Our two companies have also introduced a unique security concept called Hypervisor Introspection, which is capable of thwarting advanced attacks directly at the hypervisor level.
Up-Level Your Security Stack with Bitdefender and Citrix
Bitdefender GravityZone is a next-gen security platform that was built from scratch in 2011 for the emerging virtual and cloud infrastructure. It natively integrates with Citrix ecosystems to drastically improve the management of security services, reduce costs, and offload performance impact from user machines to a centralized security server.
GravityZone monitors VM inventory in real-time, enabling granular security policies. It automatically maintains security for VMs as they are moved across the cloud and decouples licenses from unused non-persistent VDIs as soon as they become inactive. Bitdefender also recently introduced Security for Storage, enabling Citrix ShareFile users to extend next-gen Bitdefender security technologies to automate security for their Citrix storage instances.
In addition to GravityZone, Bitdefender showcased Hypervisor Introspection at Summit. A solution exclusive to Citrix and Bitdefender, it can stop sophisticated attacks in real-time without running agents in the virtual workloads it protects.