Nutanix announced new security capabilities and teased some still-under-development ones including zero trust during at its annual .Next event.

In an interview with SDxCentral after his opening keynote, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said this doesn’t signal a shift in Nutanix’s strategy. “We are not a security company per se, but we are an infrastructure company that will build in and continue to add security features into our Nutanix Cloud platform,” he said.

These security features focus on the applications Nutanix builds, the data it manages, and network traffic it has visibility into, Ramaswami explained.

At the event, Nutanix launched the latest version of its AOS software, which now includes a network virtualization service on the AHV hypervisor called Flow Networking. The vendor says this simplifies networking and makes it easier for enterprises and services providers to create virtual private clouds. And several of the new and upcoming security capabilities center on Flow.

Flow Networking allows customers to create virtual private clouds (VPCs) in software and also provides virtual private network (VPN) capabilities to extend customers’ virtual networks to public and private cloud infrastructure. “Because we run on bare metal across public clouds and on-prem hardware, you can use the same policy, the same platform, to create VPCs wherever you are running your workloads,” Ramaswami said.

The vendor is using this same Flow technology to develop automated microsegmentation policies that Ramaswami said can help customers implement a zero-trust security strategy. This is an upcoming feature, and it will be part of a new Flow Security Central platform that is also still under development, that uses a machine-learning based policy engine to analyze network traffic and then recommend security policies to protect virtual-machine workloads against potential attacks.

It follows Nutanix’s “mantra of simplification,” Ramaswami explained. “We look at the network traffic, we know who’s talking to whom,” he said. “We create an automatic set of rules in terms of policies without the user having to go figure out who should be talking to whom or who should not be talking to whom, and then instantiate it inside the infrastructure.”

Nutanix also announced an upcoming integration with Qualys’ vulnerability management detection and response service that will allow customers to streamline security patching efforts. This, combined with new capabilities in Nutanix’s Files storage software for unstructured data, can better detect and prevent against more than 4,000 known ransomware attack signatures, Ramaswami said.

The new AOS 6 software also adds disaster recovery capabilities that allow customers to use the public cloud as a secondary site, enable automatic failover in case of a disaster, and provide end-to-end encryption for disaster recovery traffic.

“That’s really what we do for security, and we’ll continue to enhance this wherever we can over time to make it simpler for our customers to manage their security policy,” Ramaswami said.

Nutanix’s .Next event continued under the multicloud theme that Ramaswami has been pushing since he became chief executive earlier this year. It’s also a very similar strategy to Nutanix’s chief competitor and Ramaswami’s former employer VMware.

However, while VMware’s software stack runs on all of the major public clouds in addition to thousands of smaller regional clouds, Nutanix’s Cloud platform has a more limited scope. Customers can run it in their private data centers or on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while a Microsoft Azure option remains under preview.

“Nutanix is still behind the cloud curve,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. “They’re just putting a multicloud strategy in place where leading enterprises are moving to distributed clouds. That is: a single, logical cloud that spans public cloud, private clouds, and edge locations. Their version of multicloud is about a decade behind where their competition, such as Dell and HPE and VMware are.”

Still, Ramaswami maintains that Nutanix has a few key differentiators and the first two are simplicity and flexibility of choice. Customers “get one license from us, they can deploy that software wherever they want,” he said. “They can deploy it on prem, or they can deploy that exact same software on AWS bare metal or Azure bare metal. One benefit is that the license is fully portable. And these are flexible contract durations.”

Additionally, Nutnaix’s “rich set of data services” set it apart, he said. This includes its Files and Objects storage software that manages structured and unstructured data, as well as its Era database management software.

“This focus on data services is something we do uniquely in a multicloud world,” Ramaswami said. “Both us, and whomever you mentioned, provide a platform that runs across on prem and the public cloud. But when you get to the next click down, our approach is quite different. And I would argue it’s simpler for customers.”