Xen Project Member Spotlight: Bitdefender

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project, and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

Name: Shaun Donaldson
Title: Director of Strategic Alliances
Company: Bitdefender

When did you join the Xen Project and why/how is your organizations involved?
Bitdefender has been collaborating with Linux Foundation for the past three years, and active within the Xen Project community, especially around Virtual Machine Introspection, for about the same time. We officially joined the Xen Project toward the end of 2017. We are focused on security, which is core to the philosophy of the Xen Project.
How does your involvement benefit your company?
A key benefit has been working with the open source community where security is top-of-mind. Rather than developing ideas and approaches in a vacuum, the Bitdefender team of researchers and developers have been able to validate ideas and benefit from the feedback of the talented Xen Project community. There is a deep pool of knowledge around the history of what has worked, along with a wide variety of perspectives. This is why the Xen Project hypervisor is so flexible.
How does the Xen Project’s technology help your business?
Bitdefender is a security company with customers and partners across the globe. The team works on many fronts across the security landscape and our alliance with the Xen Project enables us to be a part of the open source community dedicated to Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI).
VMI is an example of a leap-forward that required creativity, experimentation, and coding by talented people to be realized beyond the academic sphere. Supporting and extending this process, as well as translating the capabilities for commercial offerings benefits everyone, including Bitdefender. To date, Bitdefender is the only commercial security vendor leveraging VMI; and the Xen Project hypervisor VMI capability has been adopted by Citrix within XenServer as Direct Inspect APIs.
The location in the stack where a security solution can gain insight, has shifted from being within the VM to the hypervisor. This fundamentally changes how workloads can be secured, which is a game-changer. VMI provides context, while keeping the security mechanism isolated. It is a best of both worlds scenario: context with isolation.
What are some of the major changes you see with virtualization and the transition to cloud native computing?
The security implications of moving workloads from traditional virtualized environments to cloud native environments, is something organizations challenge us with every day. The concept of oud-native provokes ideas about the myriad of implications of building workloads from the outside-in. This means there is a shift from service-oriented outcomes back to the way a service, whether IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, is built and, ultimately delivered.
The Bitdefender team works with organizations that are trying to understand how they can avoid grafting traditional security onto new methods of delivering services. A hypervisor which takes full advantage of hardware capabilities, and makes the result of those capabilities consumable, applicable, and actionable to higher-level services, is extremely important.
At the same time, the fundamental elements remain: processes run on supervisors/operating systems, hypervisors run on the underlying hardware, and so-on. In this, there are opportunities to apply security from the root of the stack.
What advice would you give someone considering joining the Xen Project?
If your organization wants to be on the forefront of cloud computing, you must be part of the groups dedicated to advancing the underlying technology, or risk being left behind. Organizations open to participating in groups like the Xen Project, may discover new and unanticipated ways of solving problems.
The Xen Project has over a decade of development and has benefited from thousands of contributions from individuals, users, and organizations. The collective knowledge and passion to move cloud computing forward ensures the best information sharing and access to a community focused on advancing virtualization. This enables organizations to have the advantage of lessons-learned as well as a mature structure to best continue conversations on where the Xen Project hypervisor can continue to evolve.
What excites you most about the future of Xen?
At Bitdefender, we are excited to see the ways and places the Xen Project hypervisor will be used and how it will continue to expand. From the services we consume, to the cars we drive, there is a rich future for Xen, along with the parallel need to secure it, ensuring a long and fruitful alliance with Xen.
You can read more about Bitdefender joining the Xen Project here.