According to Christine Drake, a product marketing manager with Trend's West Coast US operation, at this week's VMworld conference, Harish Agastya, the security firm's director of data centre, extolled the virtues of agentless security.
Trend Micro, she noted, released agentless anti-virus technology as a feature of its Deep Security suite at last year’s VMworld and, she says, has seen impressive results over the last year.
“In his presentation, Harish started by discussing agentless anti-virus. Trend Micro has partnered with VMware and integrated its Deep Security anti-virus with VMware’s vShield Endpoint APIs”, she says in her latest security posting.
“This approach uses a dedicated security virtual appliance on each host and small footprint drivers on each guest VM to coordinate staggered updates and scans. Resource-intensive operations, such as full system scans, are run from this separate scanning virtual appliance. And the virtual appliance also ensures that guest VMs have up-to-date security, including when they are reactivated or cloned”, she adds.
Drake went on to explain Trend's rationale in developing its agentless security and the firm's decision to expand its agentless security options with agentless file integrity monitoring (FIM) for the Deep Security suite.
FIM, she asserts, provides change control that monitors critical operating system and application files – such as files, directories, registry keys and values, including hypervisor integrity monitoring – allowing the security suite to detect unexpected, unauthorised, or malicious changes.
Trend Micro, says Drake, now provides extensive agentless server security in Deep Security by integrating with VMware vShield Endpoint APIs to offer agent-less anti-malware and agent-less file integrity monitoring.
In taking this route, she claims that Trend Micro “refutes the myth that you have to sacrifice performance to achieve effective virtualisation and cloud security.”