Enhancing Visibility of Applications and Workloads for Modern Cloud and Kubernetes Environments

Our latest Application Controller release continues to advance our leadership position in Application Relationship Management, making it easier than ever for customers to see and control their applications, and better manage and protect their business.  

Background

Enterprises face a set of daunting challenges including digital transformation, the ever-increasing reliance on applications for competitive advantage, threats from bad actors, and porous or non-existent perimeters. The digitally defined business is fast becoming the new normal. This means that cloud native application development is also the new normal. Apps and workloads spin up and spin down in real-time. Users shift between devices and locations, accessing applications on any platform from anywhere.  All these developments are both a source of great advantage and great risk. These dynamics can overwhelm conventional or legacy approaches to security, and IT visibility systems.  Yet, many enterprises remain overly reliant on disparate siloed, poorly connected network infrastructure and cybersecurity tools to manage, protect, and secure their operations.   

In fact, one of the root causes of IT inefficiency, as well as business risk, is the absence of enterprise-wide visibility, context, and understanding to run the modern enterprise–a surprising reality given the array of systems and dashboards most enterprises have at their disposal. 

Application Controller v6.1 changes the game. We are enabling customers to continuously see and control their cloud-native applications and user interactions, without giving up visibility into their existing data center environments.  In fact, with this release, vArmour is the only company that enables customers to see beyond the boundaries of a single platform or agent and control their entire enterprise.

Start to see your IT environments in an entirely new way with vArmour. Then hurdle the big obstacles you’ve faced for years, so you can accelerate your journey to a modern digitally defined enterprise.

Key highlights of Release 6.1 include the following:

Automatic tracking of workloads in increasingly dynamic environments for full visibility, control, and compliance

• Application Controller will now automatically provide a consistent and up to date representation of enterprise applications with real-time and historical views –  even for ever-changing workloads and infrastructure – without requiring custom agents that are incompatible with modern cloud and container architectures.
• Application Controller will now create and assign a unique identifier to every workload that persistently tracks the workload over its entire life-cycle, enabling more effective monitoring and policy controls for specific workloads that are spun up and down or moved based on seasonality or dynamic traffic patterns.
• Application Controller makes it easy to create asset inventory reports for regulatory compliance with simplified, automated, and accurate asset and dependency reporting.  

Enhanced support for DevOps development models and Kubernetes-based applications

• Application Controller now supports more granular visibility and control for modern applications in container environments with an enhanced integration to AWS EKS and Calico.
• With vArmour, customers can leverage the native instrumentation capabilities of Kubernetes to visualize and control cloud-native applications without increasing complexity through addition of third party agents or sidecars.
• Cloud-native applications in Kubernetes are not islands, and need to communicate across clouds and to classic on-premises applications and data.  With vArmour, customers can see beyond the boundaries of the Kubernetes environment and visualize every relationship to every workload, both old and new.  

Extending vArmour’s Application Access and Identity Module to visualize and control end user devices, providing critical insights in application access as customers embrace a distributed workforce future.

• More visibility and control for user devices that lets you quickly understand access to applications, build new detective controls, and define more robust application security policies, with new user device information from third party identity systems.
• New user device information enables you to define custom parameters and attach business-relevant information to devices. Examples include device location, status (compliant vs. non-compliant), managed (system source), and device type (PC vs. Mac, printer, ATM, etc.).
• Extensions to Relationship Search, a unique vArmour search capability, to quickly discover user device dependencies to applications using simple relationship-centric search; for example, “show me all the things my cardiac monitors are connecting to”, or “show me all the insecure connections from unmanaged devices”.

Availability
Application Controller version 6.1 is now generally available. Please contact info@varmour.com for more information.