Security Pain Points

CF: What are your partners’ biggest security pain points and how is VMware helping them?

Skipper: So it really depends on the vertical. If we take a look at the financial [sector]… the biggest thing that they’re concerned about is what they call Kronos attacks. So threat actors are actually able to infiltrate into the banking environment, and they’re laying in wait and they’re stealing data. And they’re changing time stamps to manipulate the market. A threat actor coming in to a financial system, looking at all that data, knowing their pre-financial reports and possibly going off and shorting the market. And that’s exactly what the financial industry is looking at VMware to do, especially in the application world or multiple apps, give them visibility into those threat actors in order to stop those types of things.

In the hospital-medical aspect, their concern is about ransomware. They have lots of systems within their organization, within the hospital, and the last thing that they need is the entire thing being ransomed. That’s going to impact life support systems. That’s going to impact not just elective surgeries, but critical surgeries when your systems are completely under attack. And then secondly, they’re also concerned about the exfiltration of personally identifiable information (PII). So those are just two examples from those big verticals that we’re seeing.

Kapur: And what are partners trying to do? They’re trying to build solutions, look across vendors, build solutions and solve real problems for their customers. Eventually as they see these things happening with their customers in different verticals, they turn to folks like us to give them these cutting-edge solutions to build out the portfolio that they can then offer customers. So that’s where we come in. And as we deliver more of these unique services, we’re just finding that we are becoming more present in the total set of capabilities that they’re able to offer their customers.