Cloud company VMware and security software provider ZingBox have announced a partnership in the domain of Internet of Things (IoT) security. The companies plan to integrate VMware’s Pulse IoT Center with ZingBox’s personality approach to IoT security in a bid to offer enhanced security for enterprise IoT implementations.
VMware’s Pulse IoT Center, announced earlier this year, is the first of several planned IoT products from VMware. The company describes Pulse IoT Center as an “enterprise-grade IoT infrastructure management solution” that addresses problems faced by existing IoT platforms. According to VMware, many of these platforms are cumbersome, complex and limited in security.
“The process of provisioning, managing and securing IoT devices remains a significant challenge for many organizations,” VMware’s Mimi Spier said. “We are excited to team up with ZingBox to greatly simplify the security and management of IoT infrastructure.”
With Pulse IoT Center taking care of infrastructure management, ZingBox will round out the partnership with its unique device personality approach to IoT security. This approach utilizes machine learning to determine the characteristic profile of an IoT device—an understanding of how it normally behaves. Knowing the personality of each device offers a way to identify anomalous behavior, which could be indicative of a security threat.
“ZingBox focuses on IoT security and the need to tighten it at all levels—software, hardware, network and user access,” ZingBox CTO May Wang said.
The partnership comes in the midst of a paradigm shift in enterprise IT security, largely due to the rising use of IoT solutions. Gartner reports that by 2020, more than a quarter of enterprise attacks will involve IoT. Compounding this problem is that IoT security will still only represent 10 percent of IT security budgets by 2020.
Clearly, IoT security solutions will be needed more than ever in the years to come. The simpler such solutions are to implement, the better. Therein lies a main selling point for the VMware/ZingBox collaboration.
“This partnership focuses on the benefits of our pre-integrated and pre-validated solution and how it reduces time to value for the end customer,” Wang said.