Last week, VMware debuted Horizon 8, the latest version of its virtual desktop platform. This cloud news roundup features a Q&A with the company about what partners need to know about the product. Plus, Google Cloud and Tanium have expanded their work together. Learn how the channel can help fight harmful advanced persistent threat attacks, or APTs, with the companies’ combined technologies.

VMware Talks Horizon 8 and Channel

VMware has upgraded its Horizon virtual desktop. The eighth iteration of the platform features support for more clouds, tighter security and collaboration, and more APIs. VMware says Horizon 8 puts the tools for virtual desktop management in one place and makes it easier to scale.

Jeff McGrath is senior director of product marketing, end-user computing, at VMware. Channel Futures asked McGrath for more insight into what partners can do with Horizon 8.

CF: What does Horizon 8 mean for VMware channel partners?

Jeff McGrath: Horizon 8 will provide an opportunity for partners to have strategic discussions with customers about business continuity, with a solution that can be sold and deployed tactically across whatever hardware or cloud platforms you and your customers support.

CF: What can channel partners do with Horizon 8?

JM: Horizon 8 enables channel partners to meet the needs for a critical use case, remote workforce enablement, with a trusted VDI and published apps solution that enables secure remote access to corporate resources. In addition, more deployment options than ever before are available, across traditional infrastructure, HCI, cloud-hosted and even desktop as a service. Partners will be able to solve the use case customers need, with the deployment model that best meets their requirements.

CF: What can channel partners help customers achieve with Horizon 8?

JM: With the rise of pandemic, business continuity jumped to the forefront. There were availability constraints on both hardware and cloud capacity. With Horizon 8 cloud-native services that support hybrid and multicloud deployments, IT teams can ensure wherever the necessary capacity is available and they can leverage it to enable customers’ remote workforces.

CF: How will customers benefit using Horizon 8?

JM: Horizon 8 delivers a modern platform for secure delivery of virtual desktops and applications, built on the … VMware software-defined data center foundation and integrated with VMware’s … digital workspace, Workspace One. It allows customers to ensure workforces maintain productivity wherever they work and leverage whatever strategic hardware and cloud partners they’ve standardized on. Horizon 8 supports them all and can support large, hybrid deployments from a single simple console to ensure business continuity and de-risk the business.

CF: How does Horizon 8 bolster partners’ businesses?

JM: We have seen significant growth in Horizon business and have been a trusted adviser to hundreds of businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. Partners can be that trusted adviser to their customers, helping them to maintain business continuity and give their employees the secure, trusted access to corporate applications and resources they require, from anywhere. Horizon also pulls supporting hardware and cloud infrastructure through and can help your customers leverage the cloud capacity they have purchased.

Horizon 8 will be generally available in October.

Tanium Combines Threat Response With Google Cloud’s Security Analytics

In other cloud news, Tanium has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud.

The result is a platform that includes an integration between Tanium’s Threat Response and Chronicle, Google Cloud’s security analytics platform. Tanium (and, therefore, its channel partners) is selling the product, which detects, investigates and scopes advanced, long-lived attacks. These commonly are called advanced persistent threats (APTs).

Tanium didn’t respond to our request for insight into what partners should know about the partnership and its requisite capabilities.

In a recent blog, Google Cloud noted that the average dwell time for APTs ranges from 200 to 250 days. The more time passes, the farther the threats may spread.

Google Cloud’s Sunil Potti

“Advanced persistent threats require a sophisticated approach to detection and response,” said Sunil Potti, general manager and vice president of cloud security at Google Cloud. “That starts at the endpoint, where most compromise activities begin. With telemetry sourced from Tanium’s … endpoint security approach, customers have the data they need to detect and investigate post-compromise activity to accelerate remediation and prevent future intrusion.”

The combined technologies now facilitate proactive threat hunting and faster incident response and remediation. To the latter point, thanks to Chronicle, users (or their partners) may correlate up to one year of data from the Tanium platform’s endpoint telemetry and network activity. This lets incident response teams investigate sustained, long-term attacks and take action, Google Cloud said.

The Tanium-Google Cloud partnership also extends zero-trust security to the device edge, the companies said. This capability uses Google’s BeyondCorp platform. Through the integration, Tanium will support the ability to use endpoint identity, state and compliance data with BeyondCorp Remote Access.