This chapter will cover the strategies you can use to host applications, so that you can provide freedom to end users and full control to administrators. You will learn about business values by using AppDefense, which uses machine learning to create an intent-based manifest for an app running in a VM. It can properly secure the app against malicious behavior with an algorithm that measures the running state against the intended state.

After going through this chapter, you will have learned how to get relevant alerts in a security operations center by defining an application-centric policy to detect, protect, and enforce the desired state of an application. This will also help you to design a security operations center (SOC) based on a precise decision engine, rather than having to perform guesswork.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• VMware innovation for application security
• Application-centric alerting for the SOC 
• AppDefense and NSX