ForeScout extended the reach of its security platform through a new partnership with VMware and updates to its agentless security management.

CounterACT is the company’s flagship security software. It discovers devices as they connect to the network and then classifies the device according to its type and ownership. Based on this classification, it assess the device security posture and allows organizations to set policies that determine what the device is allowed to do while connected to the network.

Earlier this year, ForeScout extended its security monitoring to the public cloud, specifically workloads running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yesterday, the company announced a similar service for VMware customers that allows them to monitor virtual endpoints in VMware’s private cloud and software-defined data centers.

The software updates, combined with security monitoring in public and private clouds, extends visibility across hybrid-cloud environments, said ForeScout CMO and SVP of products Rob Greer.

“ForeScout is taking what we’ve been doing traditionally for over a decade around visibility and control on the campus, and now we’re applying those capabilities in the context of public and private cloud,” Greer said. “We are illuminating the things in their environment that they didn’t even know were connected to their network.”

ForeScout already worked with VMware’s vSphere compute.

The new partnership with VMware will improve visibility into NSX software-defined data centers as virtual machines are created, moved, off-lined, or retired. NSX isVMware’s network virtualization technology.

ForeScout will proactively identify zombie and orphan virtual machines in VMware environments. It will also verify security profile and posture of virtual machines, and apply appropriate VMware NSX security tags to enforce segmentation policies and isolate non-compliant endpoints.

“The most fundamental use case customers have is: what is on in my data center? Is it supposed to be on? And is it communicating to the right other virtual machines,” Greer said. “If we can provide that data, we compliment NSX very nicely.”

While Greer won’t comment on future plans with other public or private clouds, “there are other platforms out there that definitely need to be considered: [Microsoft] Azure and Google Cloud and also some pure-play cloud providers that have their own KVM stacks,” he said. “It’s definitely an area we see interest in and we’re considering.”

Also yesterday, the company announced updates to CounterACT. It can now scale to over 1 million devices, providing centralized monitoring and policy management over all of them. This is important as the number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices is forecast to reach between 20 million and 50 million by 2020.

“Many of those devices are ending up in businesses or enterprises, and customers can’t answer the question of what’s connected to my environment,” Greer said. “This is a problem because they are trying to address compliance-driven regulations, and these devices also present a security risk.”

In addition to providing visibility into devices connected to the network, ForeScout also profiles and classifies many of these devices — for example, office automation or medical devices. This pre-classification means less time to deployment.

“Customers can see what’s coming into the environment, and then choose to apply policies to them,” Greer explained.