Computer security used to be about access points. The company controlled the computers, the network lived inside nice, safe wires, and all the tools everyone used were locked up in a mainframe down in the basement. That time is gone. The world now is one where the network flies through the air, tools come from cloud services, and everyone accesses the system through six different devices, one of which might be a company computer. Bringing security to the modern computing world is no easy task.

To learn more about security and mobile computing, John Furrier (@furrier) and John Troyer (@JTroyer), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, went to the VMworld US conference in Las Vegas. There, they spoke to Sanjay Poonen, GM of End-User Computing and Head of Global Marketing and Communications at VMware, Inc.

A focus on transformation

The discussion started off with Poonen explaining the transformation as businesses moved to the Cloud. He mentioned a key part of this transformation is preparing people for the public Cloud and an increasingly mobile world.

There are three points to focus on, Poonen said. The entire base of how people work is driven by identity management and access to applications. Then there’s unified endpoint management, where desktop and mobile come together. Finally, a business must consider management and security and how they think about security.

Customer expectations

Poonen then described how the security people in a company have become a key influence on buying decisions. VMware’s products protect the endpoint, the user and the data center, which makes them attractive to the security people. They’ve also picked partners with strong brands on security, he said.

Even the best security is meaningless if no one knows how to use it. Poonen pointed out that VMware needed to attack cost and complexity. On mobile, it has attacked security and simplicity. He summed up the company’s approach as consumer simple, enterprise secure.

“These solutions are going to become very critical to our growth,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE