Since its acquisition by Broadcom Inc., VMware has homed in on cybersecurity through its VMware Cloud Foundation.

The project is part of a strategy to adapt to a rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape, according to Vijay Ramachandran (pictured), vice president of product management, core infrastructure, at Broadcom.

“The attacks have become a lot more sophisticated,” he said. “There are attacks that happen in memory where there’s no files involved. Previously, the legacy file-based scanning also doesn’t take into account some of the behavioral aspects of the attack. We have to evolve our infrastructure, our protection, to ensure that we not only look at the legacy way of protecting against attacks, but also [are] keeping up to date with the new ways of protecting against attacks.”

Ramachandran spoke with theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand at the Cyber Resiliency Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how cybersecurity is evolving through private cloud and artificial intelligence initiatives. (* Disclosure below.)

Private cloud and AI features in VMware Cloud Foundation

The VMware Cloud Foundation is a private cloud platform that manages enterprise infrastructure. Private cloud has the potential to be more secure because it offers greater control, according to Ramachandran.

“Enterprises have full control with the private cloud, full control over their infrastructure, the resources,” he said. “They have control over the data, which is where most of the attacks aim for. We strongly believe that a private cloud done the right way can be the most secure infrastructure compared to a public cloud infrastructure.”

Since attackers are no longer just going after company files, but the backups themselves, companies have been shifting away from traditional disaster recovery to cyber resilience. As has become common, one technology that companies believe could support cyber recovery is AI.

“We are looking at how to leverage AI in every aspect about what we do,” Ramachandran said. “The alerts and the alarms that you get from these threats, it could be overwhelming for anyone. We’ve introduced this solution, a feature called Intelligent Assist, which sort of scans all the alarms and alerts that you get from our vDefend product and make sense out of it.”

VMware is also continuing to follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework, which outlines best cybersecurity practices, in its products. The chatbot, Intelligent Assist for Vmware vDefend, is one component in the structure of VMware’s platform, part of why Ramachandran sees the VMware Cloud Foundation as the culmination of the company’s history with virtualization.

“What we have spent the last couple of years really focusing on is bringing together compute virtualization, which is our core sort of [the] VMware platform, our storage solution, our networking solution and our management products into a cohesive whole,” he said. “Our goal with that is to ensure that our customers have the easiest way to manage and operate a private cloud with the best-of-breed products across these three components.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Cyber Resiliency Summit:

(* Disclosure: VMware by Broadcom sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware by Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE