VMs (Virtual Machines) are much easier to manage than their cold steel counterparts and more companies are opting to use a virtual environment rather than a real one. Illumio addresses security in this virtual cloud environment and looks to encapsulate each VM in an additional layer of security, this is quite the task when accounting for the many ways companies mix and match their machine environments. With companies at scale being dependent upon thousands of VMs, you can be sure this technology will be in high demand.
The company is still in stealth mode, so Herrod (pictured from his VMWare days at right) didn’t go into too much detail about what it does and how it does it. But, in broad brushstrokes, he said it’s about securing applications running in the virtual machines that are the backbone of cloud computing. “Basically, it’s about protecting each application, independent of where it’s running,” he told me. “The application should be securely wrapped as it moves around your data center, whether its running in Amazon Web Services or in OpenStack or a VMware environment.”