SmartX and AsiaInfo Security Jointly Launch Agentless Security Protection Solution for Enterprise Cloud Platform

Recently, SmartX and AsiaInfo Security Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “AsiaInfo Security”) have jointly launched an enterprise cloud security solution. This solution integrates SmartX ECP with AsiaInfo Security’s cloud security product – DeepSecurity – to quickly enable virtual machine (VM) protection in SmartX ECP.

Background

As digital transformation continues to advance, enterprise IT infrastructure is accelerating its evolution towards a cloud-based, software-defined, and converged architecture. This evolution places greater demands on security systems, especially in terms of agile deployment, unified management, and built-in protection capabilities.

However, traditional security solutions are mainly designed to protect physical servers or a single VM, making it difficult to adapt to cloud infrastructure, resulting in increased potential security risks for modern enterprise IT infrastructure.

In response to the above problems, SmartX and AsiaInfo Security jointly launched the enterprise cloud security solution. DeepSecurity, a product from Asiainfo Security, is integrated with SmartX ECP on the management, control, and data planes through common APIs. This embeds security capabilities into the SmartX ECP in a native way, fundamentally solving the pain point of separate management of infrastructure and security functions in traditional architectures, improving security capabilities while ensuring overall performance.

Solution Details

In the joint solution, SmartX and AsiaInfo Security work collaboratively based on their respective strengths in IT foundation and cybersecurity capabilities to build an integrated defense-in-depth system, effectively responding to various security threats and making your enterprise cloud compliant.

SmartX ECP serves as the infrastructure:

Provides a stable and high-performance IT foundation: SmartX’s leading distributed storage (ZBS) and computing virtualization platform (ELF) provides a stable, high-performance, and scalable resource pool for Security Virtual Machines (SVM) and deep packet inspection, ensuring the high availability and reliability of the security services.
Realizes the one-click fulfillment of cloud security: Nativeizes AsiaInfo Security DeepSecurity’s key capabilities as platform services to achieve an out-of-the-box and secured enterprise cloud infrastructure, supporting unified management and centralized policy control.

AsiaInfo Security provides cloud security features:

Provides agentless security protection: Achieves granular protection without an agent in VMs, effectively solving the problems of cumbersome agent deployment and easy-to-trigger antivirus storms in enterprise cloud environments. At the same time, equipped with features such as virtual patching, vulnerabilities can be quickly repaired without rebooting the server, building a solid security protection foundation.
Builds an integrated defense-in-depth system: Integrates comprehensive threat defense methods such as vulnerability detection and hardening, intrusion prevention, antivirus, and compliance management. This forms a complete defense matrix covering VMs and virtualized networks in enterprise cloud environments. These features help to accurately defend against various risks, such as ransomware and APT threats, while meeting rigid compliance requirements.

Solution Comparison: Agent vs. Agentless

	Traditional Agent Solutions	SmartX & AsiaInfo Security’s Agentless Joint Solution
Performance	An agent needs to run on each virtual machine in your cloud. The agent consumes CPU, memory, and I/O resources, which may introduce performance overhead/resources exhaustion in high-concurrency scenarios, downgrading the performance of critical missions.	Adopts an agentless architecture, where security detection capabilities are provided by the underlying infrastructure, with zero resource occupation on your VMs.
O&M	Agents need to be installed, upgraded, and maintained one by one. O&M complexity and management costs increase with the number of virtual machines.The application might require flexible scaling in a single cloud, but the security agent has to be installed and maintained on each VM manually.	No Agent deployment is required. Through a centralized management platform, unified policy distribution, status monitoring, and log aggregation for all assets can be achieved, supporting automatic scale-out, scale-in, and migration without repeated manual intervention.
Security Protection	The agent in each VM is the execution point of threat defense. It might be disabled, uninstalled, or bypassed. In the worst case, a compromised agent could become a launchpad for further cyberattacks.	Security capabilities run out of your VMs, reducing the attack surface and enhancing protection against threats such as APT, privilege escalation, and lateral penetration.
Application Continuity	Agent upgrades, policy updates, or version iterations may affect your applications on virtual machines. In some scenarios, a system or service restart might be required.	Security capabilities are uniformly updated and managed. Your applications will be protected by security policy upgrades with no downtime.

Solution Comparison: SmartX & AsiaInfo Security Joint Solution vs. Other Agentless Solutions

	Other Agentless Solutions	SmartX & AsiaInfo Security Joint Solution
Compatibility	The security product only has basic compatibility with the cloud platform, rather than deep integration.Compatibility and stability are not guaranteed by cloud infrastructure.	Jointly customized and developed by both parties. Tightly coupled with the SmartX ECP, the security solution guarantees full compatibility and stable, optimal performance.
Comprehensive Security Protection	Limited security functions offering incomplete protection.	DeepSecurity supports comprehensive CWPP capabilities, covering asset risk management, intrusion detection and prevention, antivirus, host firewall, and virtual patching functions. It provides unique values to protect your system in SmartX ECP.
Unified Management	Independent deployment and maintenance process.Policy configuration and O&M management need to be carried out separately.	Security components are deeply integrated with SmartX ECP’s management platform, achieving unified policy management and improving overall O&M efficiency.
Ecosystem & Services	The security service and the cloud platform maintain a loosely coupled relationship, collaborating as separate entities to serve clients.	Offer a co-developed product, supported by a consolidated service process for implementation and technical support.

Advantages and Values

High-performance, non-invasive: Based on an agentless architecture, the joint solution provides zero-footprint security protection for VMs on SmartX ECP, improving cloud security while ensuring performance.
High-availability: Real-time virus scanning and cleaning is still available even the VM is quarantined, ensuring continuous and effective security protection and fully guaranteeing business continuity.
Centralized security management and efficient O&M: Provides a unified management platform, supports “one-click” enabling and templated deployment, as well as unified resource management and uniform policy distribution.

In the future, SmartX and AsiaInfo Security will continue to deepen technical collaboration, integrate the core capabilities of both parties, and provide a multi-layered security protection framework for key business scenarios, helping enterprises build a secure, stable, and sustainably evolving cloud platform to achieve synergistic improvement of business growth and security capabilities.