How to get started with VMware Guidelines

Runecast Academy Series 2 – Part 12. How to get started with VMware Guidelines

As its name suggests, VMware Guidelines or security hardening guidelines are a set of rules that provide prescriptive guidance on how to deploy and operate VMware products in a secure manner. Not all organizations are mandated to be compliant with any security standards, they may still choose to operate in a secure environment for their own benefit. VMware provides guidelines for its own products in order to maintain a secure environment. 

Challenges to VMware Guidelines Compliance

Time-Consuming

Vendors publish a lot of security guidelines for their products in order to support customers with their security management. This is also the case with VMware. It frequently releases up-to-date guidelines for all of its products in order for customers to operate in a secure environment. A lot of time is spent finding issues and fixing them and as IT teams have a lot of other tasks that need to be handled on a daily basis, this becomes really time consuming and challenging.

Lack of IT Resources

Most companies don’t have enough IT experts to implement all the rules that VMware releases for each product. Considering the fact that VMware guidelines cover a lot of security best practices recommendations for each VMware product and you may have most of these products implemented in your IT infrastructure, it becomes an arduous job for IT experts to check all these rules, apply the recommended fix and be compliant all the time. Moreover, most IT teams don’t have the resources to analyze and apply all the suggested or mandated security standards.

Different  IT Environments

As most organizations operate in a complex environment, it becomes more difficult to implement the rules to different environments and different VMware products.  There are specific rules for each environment, and this will make the compliance journey even more difficult. Checking every system manually and implementing the required guide to each specific rule puts the organization in an unfavorable position. 

Runecast

Automated Scanning of Your Systems and Remediation Scripts

Keeping an environment secure with all the ever increasing Vmware guidelines is difficult for those who use VMware products. Their lack of time and resources make the compliance journey difficult and what eases this tremendous work, and keeps your systems up and running is an automated solution, like Runecast. 

Runecast is a platform that provides an automated solution that removes all your manual work. In a couple of minutes, it scans your systems and provides real-time analysis of all your findings. Together with the analysis it provides automated remediation scripts, so that you can fix the problem immediately. In addition, it offers a wide range of solutions such as vulnerability management, vendor best practices, configuration drift management, and more. Runecast automates your vulnerability management and security standards compliance audits for AWS, Azure, Kubernetes and VMware, as well as for Windows and Linux OS. It proactively assists with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), and Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC).

Summary

All VMware users are recommended to be compliant with VMware guidelines in order to become and remain secure in their environment. Maintaining a secure environment is challenging due to the complexity of the environments and the use of many products. An automated solution like Runecast is the remedy for this pain. With an automated solution you can save time, and other resources, by quickly scanning your environment and bringing it to the vendor-recommended state. Lastly, in Runecast you will find a lot of other services such as vendor best practices, vulnerability management, configuration drift management and audits against more than 10 security standards.

End of Runecast Academy 2!

We are at the end of our second academy series. We hope these articles were helpful, and would love to hear from you about what you learned. If you feel that you haven’t quite absorbed everything from this series or didn’t quite get something we invite you to read any of the articles again, which you can do by clicking here(insert link). 

You can contact us anytime on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or via our website. Have you read our first Academy Series on virtualization? Find it here.