VMware announces new Anywhere Workspace tool to help businesses make remote work easier

Hot off its divestment from parent company Dell, VMware is announcing a new remote work solution called VMware Anywhere Workspace, a zero-trust, cloud native platform that the company said is designed to eliminate friction between IT and remote employees, all while improving security and reducing overhead.

“Remote work is here to stay, and businesses are transforming into anywhere organizations with a distributed work model,” said Shankar Iyer, SVP and GM of end user computing at VMware. That transformation entails the use of multiple different technologies, leading to problems of fragmentation, increased complexity, and security difficulties, Iyer added. 

VMware sees a solution in Anywhere Workspaces, which Iyer said is designed to solve three problems: Managing remote and hybrid-remote employees, improving edge security and automating workspaces. 

SEE: Research: Video conferencing tools and cloud-based solutions dominate digital workspaces; VPN and VDI less popular with SMBs (TechRepublic Premium)

Anywhere Workspaces does this in a zero-trust environment by combining three existing VMware tools: Workspace ONE, an endpoint management and virtualization platform; Carbon Black Cloud, cloud-native endpoint and workload security software; and VMware SASE, software that combines SD-WAN networking and various security tools. Iyer described Anywhere Workspaces as unique in the market because it’s the only product to combine all three products into one security suite. 

VMware said that Anywhere Workspaces is built on integration points between the three products, such as Carbon Black and Workspace ONE bringing physical and virtual endpoint security and management under one umbrella, and Workspace ONE and SASE integrating to deliver zero-trust network access with security at the point of presence. VMware said in a statement that it plans to add more integrations over time.

Shawn Bass, CTO of end user computing at VMware, said that the zero-trust design central to Anywhere Workspaces is built using a risk-based conditional access engine. “Device posture, user identification and threat data are all used simultaneously to grant access,” Bass said. 

Bass describes Anywhere Workspaces as moving security to the edge, which he said VMware is doing with a series of SASE access centers distributed around the world so policy enforcement can happen at the point of presence, rather than a remote server. “We are intermediating traffic between the user and the cloud, allowing us to apply security controls on the fly as traffic passes through the SASE platform,” Bass said. 

SEE: AWS Lambda, a serverless computing framework: A cheat sheet (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

All of the products that make up Anywhere Workspaces are available now, and VMmware said that “cloud web security service for VMware SASE will be available in the summer of 2021.” Anywhere Workspace will be available on-premise, in the cloud, and in a hybrid model, and supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and other products. 

VMware is hosting an informational session on May 5 and 6 for those interested in learning more about Anywhere Workspace.   

Cloud and Everything as a Service Newsletter

This is your go-to resource for XaaS, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, cloud engineering jobs, and cloud security news and tips.
Delivered Mondays

Sign up today

Also see