Virtual apps, and specifically those deployed by market leading VMware’s ThinApp technology, are becoming increasingly popular in the financial services and healthcare-related fields, as well as with government agencies. Why? The technology allows IT teams easily streamline application mobility and eliminate application conflicts on the desktop, which at the end of the day, means reduced IT and support costs. But what about application virtualization security?
Many would assume that typical vulnerability assessments would identify virtual apps and their possible security risks (it’s important to point out that application virtualization technology does not alter the apps in any way, it simply delivers them in a virtual setting – so, if there are flaws in the apps, the flaws get delivered as well). In fact, they don’t. Or, more precisely, they didn’t. Up until our most recent release of Retina, this was the case. Today, Retina is the industry’s only security solution that is able to detect the presence of virtual apps – regardless of whether they are running or not – and their potential vulnerabilities.
To bring this subject to light even further, today eEye co-hosted a webinar with the ThinApp team at VMware - “Close Your Virtual App Security Gap” – which dug into the importance of including virtualized applications as part of your overall security strategy. Many of the attendees on the call today remarked that they were unaware of the potential compliance issues brought on by virtual apps; we sense this may be the case with many organizations out there. Thankfully for them, the ability to include their virtual apps in their overall security strategy is just a quick download away.
For those of you who weren’t able to attend, I’ve embedded the slides from today’s webinar below. I’ll update this post soon with the link to the recording of the webinar when it is available.
