Ransomware is top of mind for every executive these days, and VMware’s customers are no different.

In the last 90 days, the vendor’s Carbon Black Cloud detected and stopped more than 1.1 million ransomware attacks, said VMware’s Security Chief Tom Gillis during a VMworld interview with SDxCentral “Talk about a pandemic — it’s everywhere.”

Gillis is senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking and advanced security business group.

While high-profile ransomware attacks against Colonial Pipeline and meat processing giant JBS may draw more media attention, cybercriminals aren’t limiting their scope to critical infrastructure or global companies, Gillis said, noting a recent attack against a ferry operator in Massachusetts.

“They are not just hitting critical infrastructure, they are hitting mundane infrastructure,” he said. “Security is absolutely No. 1” in customer conversations. “The No. 1 thing they want to hear about it: Is my workload secure? How do I ensure I’m not the next ferry disaster?”

The answer to this is software, and a zero-trust security design, Gillis said. VMware uses a scaled-out, distributed security architecture to protect users and data across the network from endpoints to the data center and across multiple clouds. “It is fully automated and allows customers to operationalize at scale,” he added. “And we can do this because it’s software and driven by APIs, and it runs on every cloud. So we can really streamline operations for our customers in a multi-cloud operating environment.”

This security portfolio was on full display at VMworld earlier this month.

For zero-trust network access, VMware offers its Workspace Access, which unifies identity management and access control across applications and endpoints.

In addition to its Carbon Black Cloud, which provides cloud-native endpoint and workload protection, VMware touted its NSX Network Detection and Response (NDR), which it says is the first and only NDR product to receive a AAA rating in an SE Labs breach response detection test. The vendor is also developing tapless NDR and network traffic analysis using vSphere that will allow it to distribute sensors across a customer’s entire IT environment.

Additionally, VMware’s NSX microsegmentation and internal, scale out firewall secures east-west traffic and creates demilitarized zones in software, while also reducing firewall rules by 90%, the vendor claims.

During VMworld, the vendor rolled out new API visibility and security capabilities with Tanzu Service Mesh and posture management across both Kubernetes clusters and public clouds.

And its SASE platform added a new in-line cloud access security broker service and teased upcoming data loss prevention capabilities.

These pieces work together to secure communication between workloads, apps, and users and enable a zero-trust security approach inside clouds, data centers, Gillis said.

“There’s no zero-trust product, per se. You can’t take a zero-trust pill,” he said. But in a zero-trust approach, “you need to put security around each piece of the puzzle,” Gillis added.

VMware does this through its own portfolio, and it partners with security vendors in areas where it doesn’t provide its own products such as email security. “We have a very tight partnership with Proofpoint,” around email protection, Gillis said. “Email is not something VMware is every going to be good at.”

However, between the partnerships and VMware’s distributed security architecture, “we can put security everyplace,” Gillis said. “We touch 80% of enterprise workloads, and we can pull all this together in a holistic view.”