Forrester Research® Names Bitdefender® a Leader in Cloud Workload Security

• Forrester Research publishes first Forrester Wave^TM: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019
• Bitdefender named Leader in cloud workload security based on its scores in current offering, strategy, and market presence
• Bitdefender protects workloads at both operating system and hypervisor levels and maximizes efficiency and agility of security operations.

On December 9, 2019, Forrester Research® published its inaugural Forrester Wave^TM: Cloud Workload Security. A team led by Andras Cser, Forrester’s Vice President, Principal Analyst, evaluated cloud workload security (CWS) providers based on 30 criteria. Their research identified the 13 most significant providers, then researched, analyzed, and scored them based on their current offering, strategy, and market presence. The resulting Forrester Wave outlines key requirements for CWS and shows how each vendor measures up, helping security and risk (S&R) professionals select the right provider for their needs.

Download the full Forrester Wave^TM: Cloud Workload Security, Q4 2019 report.

 

Forrester® Recognized Bitdefender as a Leader

The Bitdefender team is honored that the preeminent industry-analysis firm has named Bitdefender a 2019 Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security Leader. Importantly, Forrester selected Bitdefender as one of only three Leaders in its evaluation of the 13 top vendors picked from an extensive list of cloud-workload security providers.

 

 

We at Bitdefender credit our Leader designation to years of security innovation inspired by the confidence of some of the world’s most demanding customers, such as Citrix, Esurance, W&W Informatik, LTE group, Barnsley Metropolitan Council, Quilvest (Switzerland) Ltd. and Mentor, a Siemens Business.

Zeroing in

Let’s explore a few areas of Bitdefender’s advantage:

Strength of Current Offering

Forrester assigned Bitdefender a “Current Offering” score of 3.26 on a scale from 0 (weak) to 5 (strong), placing Bitdefender in 4^th position among the 13 vendors. The independent research firm highlighted the security capabilities, covering both the operating system and hypervisor, and the manageability of Bitdefender’s CWS solution, represented by Bitdefender GravityZone with Bitdefender Hypervisor Introspection and Integrated Patch Management.

• Security at both the operating system and hypervisor levels. Forrester’s vendor summary for the Wave reads: “Bitdefender builds on its malware, memory, and hypervisor protection / introspection legacy to craft a broad CWS solution. The stack includes HyperDetect, a custom-tunable machine learning engine for threat detection… It can scan for and install missing patches and offers very strong hypervisor introspection capabilities...”

Consequently, Forrester awarded Bitdefender 5 out of 5 in the following areas:

• “Operating system-level workload protection”
  Bitdefender has historically delivered industry-leading security efficacy, as proven in independent third-party tests by AV Comparatives, AV-Test, NSS Labs and others. In a single solution, Bitdefender GravityZone delivers an integrated next-generation security stack featuring risk analytics, hardening and control capabilities, and multiple layers of machine-learning-based defenses to prevent, detect, investigate and respond to threats to physical, virtual, and cloud endpoints.
• “Hypervisor protection”
• “Scalability: protected hypervisors”

Bitdefender invented the concept of protecting virtual endpoints against advanced kernel-level exploits, rootkits, and bootkits from the hypervisor level. In partnership with Citrix, we created Hypervisor Introspection – the industry’s only solution that leverages the visibility and isolation enabled by the hypervisor to defend against malicious memory manipulations used in advanced persistent threats (APT).

 

 

Hypervisor Introspection seamlessly complements GravityZone to offer the most potent virtual-endpoint protection solution available: a rich security-technology stack within the operating system reinforced by a uniquely powerful memory-protection technology delivered from the hypervisor layer. Hypervisor Introspection and GravityZone are both deployed and managed from the GravityZone console, which is built on web-scale architecture and can support tens of thousands of endpoints from the same installation.

• Manageability and usability. According to the Forrester vendor summary, “Bitdefender excels in database, user, and agent rollout management… The solution has extensive configuration capabilities for setting up its back-end data stores and provides a very usable agent bulk rollout mechanism, configurable malware protection, and binary privilege escalation control… good API-based policy management as well as configurable dashboards…”

Bitdefender won top scores in the following evaluation areas:

• “Setup, configuration, and data integration”
• “Navigation and integrated environment”
• “Context-sensitive help”

The Bitdefender cloud workload security solution maximizes the efficiency and agility of security operations, as customers have confirmed. “Bitdefender was the only vendor with an easy-to-use web-based management portal for administrators,” says Brian Alexander, Sr. Systems Architect, Mentor, a Siemens Business. “It provided a clean user experience without confusing notifications… We have four virtualization people managing Bitdefender across 15,000 VMs. They’re not even the security experts. That’s how easy it is to use Bitdefender.”

The Bitdefender GravityZone Control Center provides a single point of security administration for GravityZone, Hypervisor Introspection, Patch Management, and all other Bitdefender enterprise solutions. Plus, it delivers single-pane-of-glass security visibility and manageability for all server-, VDI-, and DaaS workloads, wherever in the cloud they operate.

 

 

Bitdefender cloud workload security integrates via APIs with key cloud platforms, such as VMware, Citrix, Nutanix, AWS, Azure and Pivotal, dramatically simplifying security deployment, configuration, and policy assignment. Customers gain the ability to centrally manage security for multiple infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) accounts, automatically deploy security servers and agents, automatically assign granular security policies at scale, automatically reuse security licenses for non-persistent workloads and generate infrastructure-specific compliance reporting.

Visionary Strategy

With a strategy score of 4.04 out of 5, Bitdefender tied for second place, achieving maximum points for the following:

• Forrester acknowledged Bitdefender’s leadership in implementing the single-agent-single-console solution philosophy (“Centralized agent framework plans”) and advancing our pioneering efforts in hypervisor introspection technology (“Hypervisor protection plans”)
• Customer purchase experience. The analysis recognized, based on customer interviews, the quality of our responses to RFPs (“Vendor’s RFP response”) and the Bitdefender POC experience (“Vendor’s PoC and demonstration”). Forrester also highly evaluated our “Pricing terms and flexibility”
• Professional services and partner network. Forrester gave Bitdefender top scores for “Services and partners”
• Staffing levels. The independent research firm commended Bitdefender’s investment in and levels of “Development staffing” and “Sales staffing”.

Large Installed Base

Even though Bitdefender is one of the smaller vendors included in the Wave from the company size standpoint, our customer base is one of the most extensive in the industry. Bitdefender tied for the industry’s top spot with two others in “CWS indirect installed base” size (most Bitdefender CWS sales are indirect, fulfilled via channel partners).

We cherish the trust that businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies around the world place in Bitdefender. We appreciate the support of our channel, service provider, and technology partners. We value the passion and hard work of our employees. Thank you all for helping Bitdefender become an industry leader!