A Customer Perspective: VMware NSX, Next-Generation Security and Micro-Segmentation

VMware NSX and Palo Alto Networks are transforming the datacenter by combining the fast provisioning of network and security services with next-generation security protection for East-West traffic. At VMworld, John Spiegel, Global IS Communications Manager for Columbia Sportswear will take the stage to discuss their architecture, their micro-segmentation use case and their experience. This is session SEC1977 taking place on Tuesday, Aug 26, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Micro-segmentation is quickly emerging as one of the primary drivers for the adoption of NSX. Below, John shares Columbia’s security journey ahead of VMworld.

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When I started at Columbia, we were about a $500 million company, now we’re closing in on $2 billion and hoping to get to $3 billion rather quickly. So as you can imagine our IT infrastructure has to scale with the business. In 2009, we embarked on a huge project to add a redundant data center for disaster recovery.  As part of the project, we partnered with VMware and quickly created a nearly 100% virtualized datacenter.  It was a huge success.  But something was missing.  A security solution that matched our virtualized data center.  There just wasn’t a great way to insert security in order to address east-west traffic between VMs, nor have the security tied to the applications as they moved around dynamically. We set out looking for a solution to bridge that gap.

To address our security needs in the data center, we looked at several different strategies and at that time there really weren’t any good solutions. Many of the solutions were physical in nature.  They required us to do some crazy configurations to apply security. We looked at the Cisco 6500 firewall blades, Juniper’s virtual solution and a few other lightweight security solutions, but they just didn’t have what we needed.  We kept looking.

At VMworld last year we were introduced to VMware’s NSX.  I saw the power of the platform, and it all started to click. And when Palo Alto Networks (our perimeter firewall vendor) announced they were a major partner and that their technology integrated with NSX to give us an additional level of security, things really came together for us. The ability to drive security down into the infrastructure, down to the kernel level, and then take advantage of Palo Alto Networks next generation security was very attractive to us. Doing micro-segmentation with NSX, and then having the option of inserting next generation firewalling services from Palo Alto Networks in those areas of the business that require them, will really help us improve our overall security posture. A solution like this is where we need to be.  These tools give us the ability to manage both physical and virtual security policies centrally with Palo Alto Networks management tool Panorama. I know that when workloads move the security and policies follow the workloads.

To me, that’s what it is about – advanced security inside the data center, plus automation via software that’s completely independent of the underlying physical infrastructure. With solutions such as NSX and the integration with Palo Alto Networks to provide advanced security services, we are going to put security back in the data center, the right way.

John Spiegel
Columbia Sportswear

Click here for full details of Palo Alto Networks at VMworld, including a session with John and several presentations by our product experts.