ZingBox Announces Collaboration with VMware

IoT security solution provider ZingBox recently announced that it will collaborate with VMware, a provider of cloud computing and platform virtualization software and services. Together, the two companies aim to bring enhanced security to enterprise IoT implementations.

"One of the primary goals, and really the only goal [for ZingBox] is to secure IoT devices. What we recognize is that the security infrastructure, the security solutions that have been developed along with the typical IT assets like the laptops and the PCs of the world don’t apply very well to IoT," says John Yun, head of marketing at ZingBox. "We took a fresh look at what the requirements [of IoT] are and developed a security solution specifically for IoT. Our solution is agentless, you don't put any agents on the devices at all, and there's no disruption of communication or any type of performance degradation for these IoT devices.

"We like to think of it as, we took a totally fresh and revolutionary approach to IoT security. [It's] not something that we're trying to extend from the traditional IT side of the world in the hopes that it applies to IoT."

The collaboration will see Zingbox's agentless solution for IoT security team up with VMware’s Pulse IoT Center solution. According to VMware's website, the Pulse IoT Center solution is "an end-to-end infrastructure management solution that enables OT and IT organizations to on-board, manage, monitor, and secure their IoT use cases." More specifically, according to the website, the solution aims to:

• Simplify IoT complexity by enabling easy management across a diverse set of things.
• Improve reliability by providing accurate, real-time visibility of thing "health."
• Accelerate ROI by streamlining and accelerating how the IoT gets deployed and scaled.
• Provide peace of mind by securing IoT infrastructure across things, networks, and applications.

"VMware [has] a strong focus on IoT, being able to secure those devices as well as manage them and be able to put security in place. The reason that our synergies lined up really well is that we both have a focus towards having a consolidated solution, meaning that you shouldn’t have a separate solution for IT assets and a totally separate solution for IoT assets," Yun says. "You would almost need to have two separate organizations to manage that and somehow hope that they would talk to each other. We very much have a common vision that this is a problem that needs to be solved for the entire organization, not just one department versus another."

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