NEW ORLEANS – At the Nutanix .NEXT event here, cybersecurity vendor Bitdefender has announced the integration of their GravityZone solution with Nutanix Prism, the first such integration of a cloud workload security platform with Prism.

Bitdefender was formed in Bucharest Romania and has been in business since 2001. Their development, engineering and worldwide headquarters are still in Bucharest while they have U.S. offices in Santa Clara CA.

They have been a Nutanix strategic partner for about two years.

“One of our major focuses, for the past eight years, has been on data centre security,” said Andrei Florescu, Group Product Manager, Datacenter at Bitdefender. “Nutanix is a younger player but has been picking up a lot of steam in this space. We determined that they were an excellent company to partner with, and began that relationship with them. We have been working to link our GravityZone management tools with Prism. It secures enterprise cloud workloads, and provides great visibility and automation for security deployment work.”

Last year, Bitdefender achieved Nutanix AHV Ready status.

“At this level of engineering integration, Bitdefender would do its job and you could secure Nutanix workloads,” Florescu said. “The difference now is that we are integrated at an API level with Prism, which allows us to get insights from Prism.”

GravityZone is able to use this data to automatically deploy in-guest security tools and security servers, assign highly-granular security policies, provide infrastructure-aware reporting, and recover security licenses from decommissioned VMs.

“We can now adjust the configurations of the security tool based on the runtime configuration of the environment,” Florescu said. “Integration with the management orchestration layer also removed some awkward inconsistencies on the security management side, such as happened when you provisioned new virtual machines. Now you have full awareness. Being able to able to release a VDI license seat when VMs are decommissioned seems a small thing, but it has a significant operational impact.”

Florescu said that this new integration will give Bitdefender a significant competitive advantage in the growing number of Nutanix cloud environments.

“No one else has the same level of partnership with Nutanix in the cybersecurity vertical, and the same level of integration,” he stated.

Bitdefender expects to see significant momentum from this enhanced integration.

“Our anticipation is twofold,” Florescu said. “Nutanix already has a significant market share. They have a strong value proposition, and we have seen a lot of interest in this from our existing customer base. Based on data that we have seen so far, we expect it to be a significant business driver in 2018-19 and moving forward.”

Florescu said that this type of strategic integration also improves Bitdefender’s competitive positioning.

“Bitdefender is committed to supporting these kind of integrations, and we have multiple major partnerships, with vendors like VMware and Citrix,” he indicated. “Our positioning is improved with this announcement, because we are hypervisor-agnostic and offer a high degree of consistency.”

The Bitdefender GravityZone integration with Nutanix Prism is available now on the Nutanix Calm Marketplace.