Nutanix Weekly: Built-in Security Across Platform, Data, Network and Applications

So far in 2025, enterprises have faced a surge in sophisticated cyberattacks — with ransomware, data breaches, and social engineering attacks dominating the threat landscape. AI is playing an increasing role in attacks. Almost 9 in 10 global organizations (87%) faced an AI-powered cyber attack in the last year. Recent cuts in funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) may add to the cyber risks that enterprises face. 

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/engineered-differently-built-in-security-across-platform-data-network-and-apps#

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Transcript

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Philip Sellers: Hey again, and welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly. I'm your host, Phil Sellers, the Practice Director for Modern Data Center here at Zentagra.

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Philip Sellers: This podcast, along with so many others that we have coming at us Integra, is something we like to call Content with Context. We scour the internet for the best content around the topics we're covering, and then try to bring our real-world context to the conversation.

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Philip Sellers: But conversation's not one-sided. I have to have friends on the podcast to make this thing happen, so,

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Philip Sellers: Please welcome, some of my friends, Andy Green, a Solutions Architect here at Zentegra. Andy, how's things going today?

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Andy Greene: Going well. Excited to be here.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, you know, hopefully the rain outside today has not got you too far down. You may not even know that it's raining. You've been heads down in work all day, I'm sure, but it's raining outside.

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Andy Greene: We had a beautiful weekend in North Carolina, and if it had to rain, Monday was the perfect day for it to happen.

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Philip Sellers: Hey, I like that attitude. You found a, a silver lining, for sure, in those clouds. Chris Calhoun's also here, another Solutions Architect on my team, here at Zentagra. Chris, how are you on a gray day?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Not quite as fantastic as I usually am.

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Philip Sellers: fair?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Pretty good, pretty good start to the week.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, normally his answer is fantastic, so, not as fantastic, but that's okay. As Andy pointed out, at least it's a workday, and not the weekend. We got a beautiful weekend.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: after that.

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Philip Sellers: And we're also joined with Jair Cox, a principal architect for Nutanix, and very good friend of the podcast, been here pretty much since the beginning.

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Philip Sellers: I would say 99% of our episodes, you've been a part of.

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Jirah Cox: And… and happy to be a part of this one, too! I, as we keep on, you know, muddling our way through

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Jirah Cox: technology changes of varying degrees. I was just reading about how it took, like, 40 years just to get adoption of barcodes for, like, supermarket goods. So, you know, if you're listening to this and you're thinking about technology changes.

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Jirah Cox: Just know sometimes these things can take a very long time, but hopefully we can help you shortcut that, that process.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and it's interesting you bring up barcodes in the supermarket. I saw an article over the weekend that now, if you think to go into Best Buy and the digital price tags that they have in front of all the products.

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Philip Sellers: Those are starting to come to the grocery stores, too, and it's the first step towards dynamic pricing inside of a store. So you think about dynamic pricing that happens on Amazon and things like that, they raise and lower prices to test us out.

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Philip Sellers: That may be coming to a store near you in the near future.

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Jirah Cox: I think Christmas Day just got a little bit less fantastic learning about surge pricing for groceries.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I'm judged by Chris's face that that's not good news for him.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: No thanks.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Unsubscribe from that.

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Philip Sellers: But the same goes, like, the only thing constant is change, and especially in the IT industry, we've been faced with a lot of change. We've also been faced with new challenges we didn't see coming,

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Philip Sellers: The blog post we're talking about today is from Nutanix.com slash blog. It's called Built-in Security Across Platform, Data, Network, and Applications. It's written by Jason Burns and Eric Walters.

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Philip Sellers: Just want to say shout out to Jason Burns, who has done an awful lot of collaboration with the team here at Zentagra, most of our managed services products, and especially Nutanix Flow. Jason's been really instrumental in helping us over the years, so shout out to Eric and Jason.

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Philip Sellers: But, you know, backing up to the point, the only thing constant is change. We've got a lot of change that's happened this year alone when it comes to cybersecurity and, really cyber attacks. There's a lot more sophisticated cyber attacks that are coming.

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Philip Sellers: You know, as the article kind of points out, almost 9 in 10 global organizations, 87%, faced some type of AI-powered cyber attack in the last year.

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Philip Sellers: And that all comes on top of the fact that the federal government has cut funding to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, CESA,

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Philip Sellers: And that may be, you know, added risk to enterprises, because we're not getting notifications of vulnerabilities and other services from CISA.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, that's a considerable amount of risk increasing in just a calendar year.

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Philip Sellers: But the good news is that…

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Philip Sellers: from a Nutanix perspective, they've approached infrastructure as security first, security integrated. And, I don't know… guys, have any of you read the Phoenix Project?

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Philip Sellers: So, Jairah, I'll pose this question to you. This was required reading in my last job, and it's a book that I love, because it tells a great story, but the cybersecurity guy in the Phoenix Project, he was basically the land of no.

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Philip Sellers: And, his teammates didn't really care for him, but what did he learn as kind of a principal learning during the course of the Phoenix Project?

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Jirah Cox: You know, that's a good question, Phil, and I think… I think both… I mean, obviously I know, but I think…

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Philip Sellers: Chris and Andy and all of our listeners would appreciate you kind of restating it in your words. Sorry, I thought you owned completely.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Good answer! Good answer!

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Philip Sellers: Hey, it's that security is in the middle of everything. It shouldn't be a bolt-on. It should be something that is a thread throughout the story.

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Philip Sellers: And that's what I love about Nutanix, is that they have taken and adopted that. Security is baked into everything. And Jairah, I am so sorry. I did not mean to throw you for a loop there, man.

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Jirah Cox: Oh, good! Keeps me on my toes.

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Philip Sellers: So yeah, you know, as we talk about this blog post today, you know, there's really a lot of different aspects we're going to kind of talk about, but the Nutanix difference is stated here, it is security that is built in, not bolted on.

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Philip Sellers: And that's by design. At every level, from the platform, the data, the network, and the application, Nutanix Cloud Platform lets you protect your apps and data against cyber attacks and data loss. So we're gonna dig into this and talk about it, because I think it's a really important topic, it's timely.

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Philip Sellers: I may actually bump a couple blog posts to get this one out, or excuse me, a couple podcast episodes to get this out quicker.

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Philip Sellers: Because I do believe this is something people…

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Philip Sellers: need to hear. Cybersecurity is something that needs to be integrated at every level of your business, at every level of your decisioning, and it does not need to be an afterthought. So let's… let's talk about, a little bit, the Nutanix difference. I'm going to throw to you first, Jairah.

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Philip Sellers: what is… kind of the platform difference for, Nutanix.

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Jirah Cox: So,

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Jirah Cox: as we live in this security space, right, where we've all heard the phrase, defense in depth, right, security for us is not one thing, and we'll spend

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Jirah Cox: the rest of the episode probably unpacking this. Security for us is, is a whole bunch of things, right? It's across the entire stack, across lots of various aspects and offerings, and it's for that… getting that layers of protection, right? So, of course, at the base level, it's infrastructure. That's got to be hardened, gotta be secure.

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Jirah Cox: At just how do we exist, right? As we host customer data and are a steward of that, that's got to be absolutely, unimpeachably, thoroughly secure.

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Jirah Cox: Moving up, of course, there's networking, you know, at the VM level, at the network level, that needs to be secured as well.

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Jirah Cox: how do we do things like data protection for DR? And then getting into the app level, right? How do we offer application and data services? How do we, you know, add security to things like containers, to VMs, right? Wherever… however that application is shaped, we need to be able to have a thorough, baked-in, to your point, security offering for that.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, it is important, and baked in is exactly how I would describe what Nutanix is delivering, because

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Philip Sellers: Yo, out of the box… You have a secure state.

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Philip Sellers: you know, I remember a time with Microsoft where there… baseline…

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Philip Sellers: something analyzers, MBPA, I think was the acronym,

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Philip Sellers: Helped you establish that baseline, helped you get to a secure place.

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Philip Sellers: The difference with Nutanix is you're secure out of the box. Tell us how that's done.

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Jirah Cox: Sure. The biggest one that we've had, the longest, because it was asked for by some of our earliest customers in our history, right, is aligning to, Department of Defense, STIG guidelines, right? They're secure technical implementation guides, which say, if you're gonna run this, configure it this way.

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Jirah Cox: we taught our systems how to self-harden themselves to those baselines, a long, long time ago, and we've maintained that. So, it's as little as one instruction, right, from the operator to the system to say, pardon yourself to that, DoD baseline.

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Jirah Cox: And the system can then even monitor its compliance to that baseline, and will re-heal if someone monkeys with it, right? If I go in and say, or reduce, like, say, SSH from a key-based authentication down to, like, password, we'll catch that, we'll automatically alert on that, and then re-heal back to the stated desired baseline.

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Jirah Cox: So, that's huge. One of our recent improvements, right, to go from oldest to newest, I love our security dashboard, right? So, in the product, we now give the customer and the administrator a dashboard that helps them understand, hey, how secure is my posture here, right? What do I also need to consider?

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Jirah Cox: To get to a secure deployment, right? Things like, you know, we'll touch more on this, that network micro-segmentation, even that stig posture, any kind of, high severity patching that's required.

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Jirah Cox: network security policies, things like that. We can give you a dashboard that you can even give to your security teams, right, so that they can get visibility as well as stakeholders of the platform into how secure it is.

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Jirah Cox: Obviously, zero trust, right? Commonly means starting with, like, network-level micro-segmentation, where we help out with, how do we help wrap a firewall around a virtual machine so that we can actually enforce policy into and out of that virtual machine for what it can talk to.

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Jirah Cox: A great enhancement that just shipped recently from us that I was doing some reading on is we can now enforce that on a per-VNIC basis, not just a per-VM basis. So that means I can now have, like, an internal and an external NIC, and have different security policies for what each virtual adapter on the virtual machine can talk to.

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Jirah Cox: So, even more dynamic ability to apply those policies, and target where I need that control to be.

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Jirah Cox: And then, of course, managing the vulnerabilities and upgrades, right? So, all software, needs patching. All software has flaws, because it's all made by humans.

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Jirah Cox: Very timely statement, as you can tell I'm saying that in 2025. Maybe in the future, we'll have software not made by humans, but today, so far, all software made or aided by humans, so some bugs do ship. So sometimes the way to fix those is to patch. So how do we help make it easier for customers to patch, to know when they need to patch, to get them applied to their clusters.

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Jirah Cox: With, of course, table stakes for that is zero downtime.

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Jirah Cox: and automating the entire process, right? So you just tell us when to apply patches, and which code version you want to move to, and then our native LCM engine, which does lifecycle management, knows how to take those patches, fetch them from either our support portal, or you can host an internal repository and apply them to your one cluster, your dozens of clusters, your hundreds of clusters, same process at any scale.

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Philip Sellers: So, Andy, you know, as we talk about the self-healing stick, you know, configuration drift is a really, real problem. You know, we talk about it with our VDI heritage. Every time you make hone of a virtual machine, it's an exact copy, right?

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Philip Sellers: But how long does it stay an exact copy? And configuration drift is a real big problem with most other infrastructure systems.

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Philip Sellers: how does this, you know… and I guess, how pervasive is that configuration drift problem based on what you've seen working with customers?

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Andy Greene: Yeah, it's definitely, an issue. It's definitely out there. You know, one thing that we see is that we live in a

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Andy Greene: world where our clients tend to be managing many different sites, right? We may have a hybrid cloud model where we have some on-prem workloads, we're operating in the hyperscalers.

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Andy Greene: We may have brought compute to the edge sites, and as a result of that, you know, we have many different environments that we need to monitor. So bringing all of this into a single platform with those self-healing capabilities that we just talked about.

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Andy Greene: You know, goes a long way towards making sure that as we stand up new environments, as we, make changes in a singular environment, as one engineer makes one change.

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Andy Greene: that those changes aren't impacting that security baseline that we've set for the organization. And, you know, if we do make any of those changes, like Jaira called out.

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Andy Greene: the self-healing capability of that machine-readable STIG will come into play, and it'll alert administrators, and in some cases, set itself back to that security baseline.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, and the fact is, you hit a key topic.

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Philip Sellers: It does it on its own.

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Philip Sellers: So, with someone heads down managing other systems, this isn't something that's going to go unresolved. It's going to show up as an alert, or it's going to get fixed on its own. So, that's the nirvana state, right, for a busy administrator. And so, that's one of the key differences to me.

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Philip Sellers: Versus other infrastructure solutions.

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Philip Sellers: Chris, you know, vulnerabilities, you know, as Jairus said, at least today, you know, AI's changing things with AI-generated code.

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Philip Sellers: But, you know, vulnerabilities are there, and I would argue at the state where we're at today, AI-generated code can be less

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Philip Sellers: Compliant and less secure.

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Philip Sellers: than human-written code. I saw a meme where it showed a straight railroad track, and then it showed AI-generated code as the next one, and it had rails going all over each other.

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Philip Sellers: And I think it's an appropriate meme, right? You know, it's more complicated code today as AI is figuring out how to code.

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Philip Sellers: But, vulnerabilities happen, you know.

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Philip Sellers: LCM's a great additional feature to same point as Andy was getting at simplicity in the platform.

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Philip Sellers: Can you talk a little bit about the Vulnerability Management and Lifecycle Manager?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely, because to me, this is… this is definitely, it hits home from my past, because I remember the days of having to analyze a matrix of compatibility from past,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: fiber channel adapters matching up with versions of VMware ESX. Which one comes first? Oops, did I read the small asterisk? And then, did I then apply the second asterisk before the fir- and just that approach alone made

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: patching scary.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: vulnerability management scary, you know, just as a whole, because you wanted to almost turn a blind eye because I don't want to touch it. You know, it kind of goes back to that day one, it's pristine, it's in good condition, it's the most secure, and then from there, it's all downhill. You know, from

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: We'll say past technologies.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: But obviously, in…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: respect to LCM specifically. To me, that's a fantastic way of Nutanix taking a difficult concept and making it simple for end users. It's really, hey, look.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Because of the, hardware compatibility list that's built into Nutanix, it aids in the simplicity of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: keeping your environment up to date. It'll do the scan for you, it applies the updates in the order that it needs, and I really think that that's just a part of the overall functionality of Nutanix, but even more so that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I would say it's less vulnerable than some of the competitors. I remember days past as a customer where there was a day zero vulnerability out pretty much once or twice a month.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And if you were a large customer, you just barely got everything patched before the next round of vulnerabilities came in. So, to me, that's a big difference in the approach that now Nutanix is taking for simplicity, and just making the life of a day-to-day engineer much easier.

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Jirah Cox: Yeah, I think that's part of the philosophy, is how do we make it…

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Jirah Cox: Easier and more boring to patch more often.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Right.

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Jirah Cox: Because when you… when you have a hand in owning that infrastructure, if you're a customer, you've…

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Jirah Cox: heard me say this, like, the value prop to being a practitioner of, like, I manage the hardware firmware, I manage the, you know, HBA or the NIC firmware updates, it's like, well, that's kind of a zero-sum value prop to you as the practitioner, right? Either it's

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Jirah Cox: either you do it so well that no one notices it, and all the redundancy works, and everything kicks in, and it's one of those invisible IT, like, business forgets there's value there, and that being done well, or…

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Jirah Cox: if anyone in the business notices that it's happening, that's bad too, right? So, there's no… there's less and less value in being good at it, and the cost of failure there gets scarier and scarier. Therefore.

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Jirah Cox: That's the value in, look, we automate the entire thing, we know how to do it for the full stack, you just tell us how far to upgrade to, which version, and when to start. And that's it.

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Jirah Cox: Right, so that, to Chris's point, how do we help do it faster, right? Again, to your point, Philip, Phoenix Project, great. How would I do it weekly? How would I do it daily? How would I make it boring and just in the fabric of existing with the platform?

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, safer. Safer is how I would sum that up, right? How do you do this in a way that it reduces risk within your organization?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yeah.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely.

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Philip Sellers: And, Chris, you are our resident former teacher. You've got some homework for everyone listening, because this blog post is pretty special. It's got a lot of…

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Philip Sellers: Extras.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yes.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: So, there are sections, obviously, throughout this, particular blog post that I think are absolutely foundationally fantastic for, those engineers, those admins, those upper-level executives that want to understand

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: how Nutanix is different.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: This is a centralized post that pretty much talks about those components, and each one has

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: an included video from some of the Nutanix experts that you mentioned. Jason Burns has got a great one in here. Throughout the scrolling through are all of the names that are… and it's not about name dropping, but it's about content dropping.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: This is a fantastic place to come for this particular article, just to understand

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the holistic approach that Nutanix takes, the value of security. Whenever, obviously, Andy and I, our past, we…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: talk Nutanix security from day one, and that's really built in the platform, and that's, to me, the key differential that some folks haven't recognized that goodness yet. So please come here.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Listen to the podcast first, give us a vote of 110,000, thumbs up, and…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: go listen to these videos, watch those, in your free time. I promise you, you'll gain some understanding and appreciation from

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: one of the specific concepts that'll help you in understanding the value of Nutanix. So, that's the homework that I would recommend. Check out the videos, check out the blog, and check out this crazy crew of, cast of characters in our podcasts.

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Jirah Cox: And, teacher, that's, due when?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: By next episode.

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Philip Sellers: That's fantastic. Thank you, Professor Calhoun.

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Philip Sellers: For everybody listening, you go watch the videos, we're gonna send you, something for completing Nutanix 310 as assigned here from the podcast.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: There you go.

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Philip Sellers: But, it is great. This is… we were talking before we started the recording today, this is a great introduction. If you're looking at moving to Nutanix from VMware or from another platform.

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Philip Sellers: This is a great central blog post to kind of understand what it's all about, how things work. So, there's a ton of additional content linked to the blog post. Please do check that out.

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Philip Sellers: So let's move to the next layer. We talked about the platform first, now let's talk about the data. Data protection is core.

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Philip Sellers: There's a lot of different ways around data protection, so we're gonna highlight 3 of them. Jaira, what are those 3 for data protection?

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Jirah Cox: First one's, data host encryption. Gotta do it, right? As we're hosting data.

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Jirah Cox: Lots and lots of regulation can exist for lots of very good reasons, saying that data must be stored in an encrypted fashion, especially think about… think about IoT, think about AI at the edge.

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Jirah Cox: As the data lives closer to where perhaps end users or even less trusted users might reside, like, think point of sale, encryption's got to be table stakes, and of course we have that. We specifically call out ours as being flexible.

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Jirah Cox: Because we can do it with or without specialized hardware. If you require specialized hardware encryption, we can, of course, comply with that. Software, of course, can run anywhere, and even can get integrated with, like, cloud-based key managers as well, when you have a cloud-based requirement to use a KMS as a service from, like, a hyperscaler as well.

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Jirah Cox: Business continuity and disaster recovery, right? Because again, part of security is availability, right? So therefore, part of an attack can be denial of availability. So then business continuity, disaster recovery, things like, how do we replicate your data from, location A to location B, or location A to B and C?

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Jirah Cox: And how fast, right? So, nightly, hourly, minutely, or even if you're close enough that laws of physics support it, even full synchronous replication as well.

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Jirah Cox: How do we store that data using immutable snapshots? Immutable both in that they can't be changed after they're taken, but also immutable, like, we can prevent

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Jirah Cox: say, deletion by, like, a malicious admin account. So if I even had one of my users get, compromised and had full-on admin credentials to the cluster, maybe only one human isn't allowed to delete that data. I need to have two humans approve that kind of action.

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Jirah Cox: How would I even store data up in, like, cloud-like formats? How can I take a snapshot from a running application on-prem, send that up to, like, say, AWS S3 storage as a usable snapshot? Well, that's mostly 321 compliant, right? It's not a backup, it's, like, a 3.21 snapshot.

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Jirah Cox: But now I've got multiple copies, in multiple formats, in multiple availability zones.

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Jirah Cox: That's pretty resilient.

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Jirah Cox: And then lastly, you know, how do you get visibility into that data, right? And something that we just, frankly, couldn't say enough good things about if we tried to for data lens, right? Our eye in the sky, watching transactions into the unstructured data you host on the platform, so think

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Jirah Cox: file shares, think object shares, you know, that kind of stuff. I love about Datalens, how we've walked down

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Jirah Cox: that exposure window. When we first launched it, it was, like, 15 minutes of response time was our published, SLA there. We were at 10 minutes for a while. Now, this article called out 6 minutes or less for a threat containment window.

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Jirah Cox: for active ransomware doing bad things to my data, 6 minutes is pretty darn fast, where we can detect and alert and block that attack from happening, and then if you give us permission to, automatically recover that share to a prior known good point in time, which might be

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Jirah Cox: maybe 7 minutes ago, right? Get that share back online, automatically, zero human interaction, and let the business keep on moving forward in time with very, very little data loss. And then I can have my forensics teams come in, sweep the data that was touched.

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Jirah Cox: isolate it, you know, do what they need to do for that, for reporting, or, or selective restores, and, you know, as I'm doing all of that, I'm also moving forward in time and helping the business stay running.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, love DataLens, love the… the purpose of that tool, and it comes at an amazing time when there is increasing

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Philip Sellers: risk from AI-based attacks. You know, earlier this year, you also,

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Philip Sellers: released an integration with CrowdStrike. So, CrowdStrike plus Data Lens is another place where you're able to work together with their next-gen SIM, to be able to,

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Philip Sellers: correlate and do some alerting. So, you've always had that mindset of better together, working with partners in the ecosystem. So that's just a great place to highlight that you're continuing to push forward, even in newer products like Data Lens.

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Jirah Cox: Yep, it's definitely very exciting.

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Philip Sellers: And Andy, I mean, when we talk about DR in general,

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Philip Sellers: you know, the data set, or the toolset here in the Nutanix platform is amazing. You know, the outcomes we can drive are really fundamentally different than,

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Philip Sellers: other competitive platforms. Talk a little bit about the DR capabilities and the outcomes we're driving with customers.

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Andy Greene: Sure, sure, yeah, you know, like I mentioned before, we live in that hybrid, multi-cloud world, and you know, the Nutanix platform has those capabilities built in, so we don't need third-party applications or necessarily the application-specific capabilities.

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Andy Greene: to provide that data protection and online DR for the applications that our clients are managing.

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Andy Greene: So, you know, they're going to provide strong protection across all RPO and RTO levels, and you really don't need to purchase anything additional to do that site recovery, whether you're recovering to the same data center, recovering to your DR site, recovering to the cloud, maybe a cleanroom scenario.

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Andy Greene: Or, you know, here at Zentegra, we have our own,

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Andy Greene: product that's available for that, and that would be DR as a service that allows our clients to basically have, you know, full-stack Nutanix, both in your data center and in ours, and take advantage of all of that BCDR capability that's built into the platform without having to manage and maintain that secondary data center.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, you know, it's simplified again. At the end of the day, we're driving outcomes, and it's a full feature set. You know, you're able to do…

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Philip Sellers: The data replication, which is generally where storage vendors stop, they do data replication, and then some other application has to come along and handle orchestration.

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Philip Sellers: this is all built in. You can orchestrate, you can run scripts, you can have failover. It is really end-to-end, and so I think that's one of the key differentiators, is it's not…

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Philip Sellers: an afterthought, just like security, DR protection is fully baked. You've got the end-to-end solution, and that's something to be really appreciated.

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Philip Sellers: Once again, homework. There is a great video here about Datalins, embedded into the article. Would love for you to spend some time learning more about Datalins, if that's not a product that you're aware or familiar with. Definitely homework from Professor Calhoun.

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Philip Sellers: And then, let's move to the next layer, the networking layer. Jaira, networking comes in a couple of different varieties when it comes to Nutanix, and they share a name.

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Jirah Cox: They do! They're in the same family, if you will, right? So, under that, under our flow marketing umbrella, right, we've got, two main,

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Jirah Cox: Pillars?

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Jirah Cox: what goes under umbrellas? There's two people under the umbrella, I guess, is maybe the analogy, goes that way. The first one, of course, is, is flow virtual networking, right? So how do we apply, like, SDN principles

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Jirah Cox: to bring, cloud-like networking, think, like, VPCs, right? So, which themselves, it gets, I guess, to be kind of a recursive acronym.

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Jirah Cox: of virtual private clouds to your deployment, right? How can I treat my on-prem networking, or my cola networking, or even my edge networking

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Jirah Cox: like I would cloud networking, right? Where I can define my networks per application or per tenant, all in software, no need for additional hardware.

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Jirah Cox: And even that by itself can lead to things like tenant isolation or application isolation that I might want for my security outcomes, and I'm doing that at the, you know, layer 3, layer 4 network layer as well.

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Jirah Cox: But on top of that, of course, we can also do, network security, right? So flow network security, the other, the other person under that umbrella. Micro-segmentation, right? So zero trust for how do I ensure that even two VMs with, joining IP addresses.

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Jirah Cox: on the same network, on the same hypervisor, still can't talk to each other in any ways that I don't approve of, right? So I can…

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Jirah Cox: block at the VM level, block at the VNIC level, block at the port level.

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Jirah Cox: or even for a VDI use case, make all of this application, Active Directory aware.

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Jirah Cox: So that I can even have per-user rule sets as well. Because I like to think of, and apologies to all my EUC friends, the VDI part of the network is, like, the dirtiest, least trusted part of the network. That's where users live, they open attachments and click on links and do their email.

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Jirah Cox: Click on random YouTube videos. So, like, I want to have a lot of security in that part of the network, for sure. So letting that control to say, maybe in my entire VDI environment, no desktop, talk to any other desktop, period. They talk to patching, talk to XDR, I can get northbound, but I can never get east-west.

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Jirah Cox: Is a huge, huge restriction immediately on what ransomware can do with my environment.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And I think I've got a good example of that, because thinking about those kind of users, Jairus specifically, you know, obviously those EUC users, they… out in a remote workforce, they are using

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: this device as a connection into corporate, but they need to be filtered, monitored, protected, secured, and almost fenced in as

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: please be careful of what you access. So, to me, the guardrails are really key to that, and I think one of the neat, concepts is being able to even, by use of Active Directory groups.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: specifically limit, what users can get to. And I think either… I'll say limit, but also allow.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: So that's a good way of putting it, from some structure that you already have as a, I'll say, a capable system administrator that already has some logical constructs in place for the grouping of those end-user compute users, that that would be something that you would want to implement.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And then, to segue, my own, thought is something else that I just remembered, is…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Back in my day, of course, app owners would come to me and say, hey, Chris, I need your help, understanding what my application talks to.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Believe it or not. And I was like, okay, you wrote the application, it's homemade script, so how do you not know? But, with the fact that with Flow Virtual… I'm sorry, Flow Network Security, you can put it in monitoring mode.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: That's something that is an absolute blessing for any system administrator, and just watch the communication, so that you can help users

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: put guardrails around that so that they just don't say, okay, I need any, any access from a network's perspective. So, with those two faults of guardrails, that's kind of my main focus here around flow network security, is…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Please be…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: of course, diligent, and also purposed in your efforts to make sure that you put guardrails around your end users, and I'm telling you, Flow can help with that, for sure.

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Jirah Cox: Well, obviously that person doesn't want their phone ringing too much after 5 o'clock.

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Jirah Cox: Maybe not even before 5 o'clock.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: There you go.

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Jirah Cox: Sounds like a really good way that we could actually add security to running applications without making the phone ring more, which kind of is job number one, right?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely. Almost like, fantastic.

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Andy Greene: Yeah, I definitely have been a big fan of Flow Network Security from when it was first released.

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Andy Greene: you know, I think, back to our discussion earlier about that defense-in-depth strategy, this is the perfect example of it. Traditionally, you know, we treated the data center like a fortress, and we built that big, strong wall around it.

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Andy Greene: And then we used something like a VPN to get in, and we trusted that that made our data center secure.

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Andy Greene: But, you know, Flow brings to the table the ability for our platform administrators now to have security at the vSwitch layer. And if you think about it, all of that network traffic from all of your virtual machines has to flow through the vSwitch.

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Andy Greene: So, you know, we can do that without necessarily involving the networking team if we don't want to.

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Andy Greene: And it's just a great way to head off that east-west traffic and, you know, with the understanding that once some type of infection, some type of malware gets into your data center, the first thing that it wants to do is it wants to spread itself, and

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Andy Greene: So I've always been a big fan of flow. You know, I think there is a level of simplicity that we haven't seen with a lot of similar type of

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Andy Greene: micro-segmentation products that are out on the market today. And, you know, the simplicity and just being part of that defense in-depth strategy is a big part of why.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I'll… I'll point out that,

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Philip Sellers: Nicera, before VMware acquired them, their innovation was in the overlay networks, and that was really…

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Philip Sellers: their take on network virtualization. You guys approached it differently. You started in the security space.

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Philip Sellers: then brought the overlay networks kind of to bear, and… if I have my history right. And, you know, I think that's a realization that this east-west conversation is a much more valuable thing

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Philip Sellers: you guys had this unbuckled from your overlays, because again, it didn't quite exist then, where VMware had to unbuckle their network security product from overlays, and then make it available to traditional vSwitches, so…

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Philip Sellers: from the beginning, your intent has always been securing the network, no matter where the traffic's at, and I think that's a great value to customers.

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Jirah Cox: Totally agree. I would also submit that, there's some real opportunities that we were able to take advantage of by

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Jirah Cox: coming along after public clouds, right? Because that's really become the goal, is to look, act, feel like a cloud platform that you can vend securely to your tenants and with full sovereignty and full governance, wherever you want to run it, right? So, private cloud, public cloud, hybrid multi-cloud, your data center, colo, or even in hyperscalers.

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Jirah Cox: So therefore, it's easier to look, act, and feel like cloud after cloud had been invented. So that's… that's one… one, one thing that was in our favor. And then also, the dramatic rise in open source, right? So we get to use things like OpenVSwitch, which we can program ACLs into.

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Jirah Cox: to power, the actual functionality of our micro-segmentation, things like Genev tunneling for our overlays, that can power, the VPCs. It's, it's a better-together kind of approach of how can we help make using awesome open source tech easier for our customers.

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Jirah Cox: without requiring traditional open source care and feeding of, you know, you pay for that differently, not with cash, but with, like, human capital around getting SMEs. Well, this is both, right? It's just a product that you get to own and administer.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, absolutely.

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Philip Sellers: You know, one more thing to talk about when it comes to networking security from Nutanix is Security Central.

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Philip Sellers: overarching product, helps with compliance. Jairic, what can you tell us a little more about Security Central?

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Jirah Cox: So, yeah, the goal of Security Central, and I love it, right, is to give you that kind of, one browser tab to rule them all, right, that shows you all of your stuff everywhere, all of the time, right? So, in even keeping with this theme, well, I want to have a global dashboard for things like vulnerabilities, or configuration drift.

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Jirah Cox: I want to see all of my stuff, whether it's at the edge, or in a hyperscaler, or in the, you know, through the wall behind me, no matter where it lives. And that, helps give visibility to things like, you know, am I aligned with my NIST baselines? Am I aligned with my PCI DSS baselines?

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Jirah Cox: And I can see that in one spot now. So that's, you know, to be not too obvious here, the central part of Security Central, you know, as part of, as part of Nutanix Central.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and having had to do PCI, and understanding and trying to navigate just the rules and regulations that come from the body.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I feel for you. So, if you're doing PCI, and you're doing it manually, there's a ton of value, and you should be talking to someone at Nutanix about Security Central, because, again, simplifying that process, being able to not only

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Philip Sellers: get into the desired state, but keep it in desired state, and then prove that back to an auditor. There's huge value in that, and that's what Security Central's all about.

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Philip Sellers: Let's wrap things up with one last section. We're going to talk about application security. What do we have from an application security standpoint, Jairah?

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Jirah Cox: So keeping with that theme of availability, right? Things like, how do we help apply that to databases, right? Because databases, and what our database as a service platform can do, you know, things like, how quickly can you go patch every critical database engine that hosts data that powers your business?

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Jirah Cox: Right? Do you even have up-to-date spreadsheets around which versions of SQL or Oracle or, you know, Postgres are we running, to even know where, like, maybe a hot new CVE applies?

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Jirah Cox: how quickly, once you knew where to go stamp out those patches, could you get humans to go do that, right? Is database patching still exciting or boring yet in your organization, right? We obviously want to help

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Jirah Cox: with, processes and products to help make it much more boring, rather than spicy. And so, helping patch databases, helping patch those environments, and even in that vein of, you know, consistency.

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Jirah Cox: yields uptime, right? Just even solving for, like, configuration drift and getting closer to policy-based management, that's where we play in the database as a service space, which you get to own and run and host anywhere you choose to, right? In a private cluster, in the cloud, in a hyperscaler, in a colo, or anywhere.

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Jirah Cox: Again, you know, we're all big fans of humans clicking on fewer buttons and letting automation and policy-based governance do more and more for us. That, of course, is where leaning into automated application deployments yields a lot of benefits, right? That's where our NCM self-service product really shines.

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Jirah Cox: Where we can help, people create blueprints, and I can write that once and then deploy it many. Some folks even have, like, a blueprint for

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Jirah Cox: you know, if they're doing higher, more complex tasks, like, I have developers that are running software that I sell, cool, here's a blueprint to give a new developer on day one their own sandbox, right? Their own…

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Jirah Cox: code repo, their own sandbox, their own, maybe, database fork, so they can get productive even sooner, right? Or if they break it all, I can redeploy that, even faster.

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Jirah Cox: And then, keeping in that vein, the most platonic ideal of automated application deployments, of course, is Kubernetes, right? Where, like, literally everything is done in everything as code.

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Jirah Cox: And so being here for both, you know, applications of, like, say, yesterday and today's shape of virtual machines, and of tomorrow's shape of containers, but offering that unified benefit of, like, security and automation for the entire thing.

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Jirah Cox: that by having a Kubernetes platform built into our platform, customers get the benefit of that for both container-based deployments, but also the security aspects as well, right? It's not just fast, it's not just agile, it's not just something that my developers want to see me vent to them as an application architect.

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Jirah Cox: It also brings along security and observability, and yields uptime by virtue of what it is.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, you know, the changes in the way that we use software, the way that we architect applications is a big part of, you know, the conversation these days. I mean, supporting app developers, and again, automation being a key point.

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Philip Sellers: You talked about it with Nutanix, or NCM Self-Service.

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Philip Sellers: But also, you know, the

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Philip Sellers: primary value of NKP is self-service, too. You're really driving those outcomes for businesses. You know, one of the…

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Philip Sellers: One of the things that I love that you guys have done is, you've also entitled every user who already has NCI Pro or Ultimate to have NKP Starter. That's a great way of getting

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Philip Sellers: A platform where you can highly automate your software development, marry it to your pipelines, meet your app developers halfway.

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Philip Sellers: and be cloud-like You know, 3 great things that are all of value to your organization.

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Philip Sellers: So, you know, it's a great way to take an infrastructure team and make yourself look like a huge winner. You're a pro company, you're pro-app developer. This is a great way of being able to do it.

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Philip Sellers: I happened to do a lab with a group I'm a part of through Nutanix, and got to see the deployment and the tooling and stuff in NKP. And, you know, what I would say is, like so many other things you're doing.

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Philip Sellers: NKP makes Kubernetes approachable. You're giving GUIs and interfaces and the ability to do policies and controls. So I know we're talking security. Those policies and controls are not an afterthought. It's all prescribed. You can add users and add access and…

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Philip Sellers: It's really approachable for an administrator, it's point and click. So, that's a huge win, along with the supportability for

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Philip Sellers: as you said, something that's largely CNCF… well, it is CNCF compliant, but largely open source in its base. So, that's what an enterprise needs to be able to succeed, with open source.

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Jirah Cox: And what I love about that, to your point about it being included for so many of our customers, is that, we've all been there. I've been the person on the other end of the email catching a surprise, and oops, I need to go solve for that.

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Jirah Cox: And this is such a great inclusion for our customers that, you know, when someone says, hey, I need this, you can say, hold on, give me 20 minutes, come back, and look, that's now solved for. So, you know, no one loves that whole, oops, let me go find a product for that, or solution for that, and demo it, and POC it, and integrate it. This is… this is… that's all done for you here.

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Philip Sellers: Quinn, the last point, integrate it, right? You know, there's a lot of products out there, but do they integrate? Do they… do they integrate to a level that meets the user needs?

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Philip Sellers: More than likely, the answer is yes now, where Nutanix stands in the industry. You know, there's wide support across all sorts of applications and ecosystem partners, so that's… that's all a check mark. But again, where it's built into the platform, it's fully integrated.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I definitely think, something to… to me around the app deployment that really makes sense is,

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: with a focus around security, these days, obviously, anything that's being automated, tooling that you guys, as end users, or, I'm sorry, as admins are, are using, whether it's a PowerShell, it's…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: any kind of scripting environment that you're accustomed to, Nutanix, to me, what used to be called Nutanix Calm is now this, NCM self-service. And the benefit there is Nutanix is the glue. You don't have to change your tooling, so if you've already got

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: a secure scripted environment. Continue using that. Integrate that with Nutanix, and that's the… that's the integration that we've all talked about today, is it's baked in. And… and…

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Nutanix is allowing for that, even though, yes, it is additional tooling, but it's not anything that you have to pick up and learn. Use your existing automation toolset, continue with the platform, and move forward with making your work

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Smarter and more secure just by, automation.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, and, you know, I think that's been kind of the key point all throughout this section, talking about

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Philip Sellers: applications is… is automation. And so, I think, you know, Jairus said it really well when we talk about Nutanix database services. It's really around changing that paradigm

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Philip Sellers: to think about databases differently, Andy,

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Philip Sellers: what… what kind of have you seen in the past with databases and DBAs that… that…

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Philip Sellers: probably needs to change, and that MDB can help with.

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Andy Greene: you know, in the past, databases were really just set up to run and run and run. We didn't make changes unless we really had to.

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Andy Greene: But, you know, that's not providing a service to the business. So, database as a service is just something far more dynamic. It makes it very easy to do things like all of your patching, your cloning.

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Andy Greene: standing up those additional copies for your test dev environments, QA environments, etc. But I think the, you know, the key thing with regards to this security discussion that we're having is making sure that you're always up to the latest, you know, patch levels from a security perspective.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I think Waterfall…

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Philip Sellers: versus Agile, you know, the development methods has really kind of driven this change in the database culture.

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Philip Sellers: You know, it used to be we would take an application, we would buy it.

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Philip Sellers: There'd be a release once, twice a year.

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Philip Sellers: the database was just supporting that application. And that's waterfall method. You know, you do a big code release, big bang.

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Philip Sellers: DevOps and Agile change the world. We're doing incremental changes all the time, and so…

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Philip Sellers: the database layer, or I'd argue the caching layer with something like Redis, or any of these other microservices that support data interchange.

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Philip Sellers: in an application, all of those services are just expected to be incrementally updated, and so…

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Philip Sellers: NDB is recognition of the fact that you need APIs to be able to interact with it. Cloning that data is a critical thing, because you need clones of it to test it, right? As part of automated testing and things in your development pipeline.

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Philip Sellers: But to your point, keeping it secure is paramount. Can't afford to have insecure

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Philip Sellers: things just sitting on your network anymore. The entry points and the AI to leverage the hosts is out there, and so…

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Philip Sellers: That kind of brings us full circle.

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Philip Sellers: to the topic that we started with, AI attacks are up.

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Philip Sellers: We need to protect things. You know, so much of the infrastructure's running on our hosting platform, on our cloud platform. How do we keep it secure? And kudos to folks at Nutanix, because this is an integrated approach across all layers, and

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Philip Sellers: it's gonna help you have less calls. I love that call out, Jairah.

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Philip Sellers: Have less calls after 5, and, you know, just manage and maintain, because none of us want the call.

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Philip Sellers: Of some sort of a cybersecurity event at the end of the day.

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Philip Sellers: And it's never my point, or I think any of our collective points, to instill fear out there, but there has to be a realization of the landscape and how it's changing, so…

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Philip Sellers: Guys, I appreciate all of your perspectives. We've had a great conversation around this. It's a longer blog post, and I'm gonna tease, with your homework to go see the videos. There's also another section at the end that you can read for yourself, how Nutanix Security stacks up against VMware.

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Philip Sellers: We're not going to cover that on this podcast, but it's a great reason for you to go and look this one up. Again, it's available at Nutanix.com slash blog. The name of the

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Philip Sellers: blog post is built-in security across platform data, network, and applications. We covered all four of those major areas. Thank you, Jairah. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Andy.

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Philip Sellers: Appreciate you having on the podcast with me today, and

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Philip Sellers: Thank you for listening. We appreciate it, we know your time's valuable, and

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Philip Sellers: We hope to catch you on the next episode. Until then, have a great day.