The future of data centre security within healthcare
Constantly improving security is a key priority for all public sector organisations, especially given the growing number of attacks exploiting security vulnerabilities in lateral data centre network traffic.
Security attacks on healthcare have risen sharply and to unprecedented rates, making openly sharing patient information a huge risk for healthcare organisations. The NCSC and international partners have observed an increase in sophisticated, high-impact ransomware incidents against critical infrastructure organisations, and as a result, healthcare organisations must evolve their security architecture.
The traditional approach to data centre security is changing
The traditional perimeter defence is moving to a distributed, more granular Zero Trust model that calls for enforcing security policies on all traffic between data centre nodes. Micro-segmentation is an area many organisations have looked into to improve their security strategy, but this has caused challenges in the past due to changes to the network or offered features already covered by your current networking provider. VMware’s NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) addresses those challenges by separating the virtual network layer from the micro-segmentation technology meaning minimal changes to your network or existing firewall rules.
Introducing VMware NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW)
The DFW is a software-defined Layer 7 firewall, purpose-built to secure multi-cloud traffic across virtualised workloads. It provides stateful firewalling with intrusion detection system (IDS) or intrusion prevention system (IPS), sandboxing, network traffic analysis (NTA) or network detection and response (NDR) – delivered as software and distributed to each host.
With complete visibility into applications and flows, NSX DFW delivers superior security with policy automation that’s linked to the workload lifecycle. Unlike traditional firewalls that require network redesign and traffic hair-pinning, the NSX DFW distributes the firewalling to each host, radically simplifying the security architecture. This allows security teams to:
- Easily segment the network
- Stop the lateral movement of attacks
- Automate policy in a vastly simpler operational model
Discover VMware NSX DFW for your healthcare organisation now
Speak to one of our VMware solutions specialists today for more information about the NSX Distributed Firewall.
