Securing Your Most Critical Workloads with the Sensor Gateway

For many organizations, workloads may be where you find the most critical business information. This comes with a need to enforce a strict security posture – ensuring workloads are not directly exposed to the Internet for security, regulatory or compliance reasons. Thus, a sensor gateway can be brought in to reduce the attack surface and be the sole entity that communicates with the Internet.

The Carbon Black Sensor Gateway was first introduced in February 2023 as a Linux Docker container on-prem installation for limited connectivity environments. It has allowed organizations to keep their workloads secure and insulated from any Internet traffic, by serving as a trusted entity to provide communications between the VMware Carbon Black Workload sensor and the VMware Carbon Black Cloud.

Every user environment is different, which is why the Carbon Black Sensor Gateway has expanded its capabilities for defending highly secure architectures and limited connectivity environments. We also recognize the complexities of using a proxy. Our sensor gateway can reduce the complexity involved in using multiple software tools for securing workloads in a limited connectivity environment. Bringing in a new tool for the security stack can become costly and traditional proxies may not always be considered a trusted entity. However, proxies can be necessary depending on an organization’s environment or industry – which is why the Carbon Black Sensor Gateway is designed to be flexible to your needs.

New Sensor Gateway Capabilities

Open Virtualized Appliance (OVA)

The Carbon Black Sensor Gateway has now expanded its feature set to work as a virtual appliance. It allows organizations to quickly deploy a Carbon Black Sensor Gateway without the requirements of keeping up with specific Linux operating systems (OS) or container versions. Today, users will be able to deploy their Windows or Linux sensors on the Carbon Black Sensor Gateway as an appliance. By doing so, Carbon Black eliminates the need for the user to worry about those management headaches such as:

Maintaining separate infrastructures
Keeping up with OSs of on-prem devices and container tool changes
Providing seamless upgrades for the sensor gateway via the Carbon Black UI

Let Carbon Black handle the upgrades and management while you focus on creating a secure environment.

Optional Proxy Support

Many organizations like regulated industries have extremely secure architectures, where despite having a sensor gateway, they require an even higher layer of protection. This layer would be a connection to an independent proxy, ultimately providing that outbound connection to the cloud. The Carbon Black Sensor Gateway will provide vendor-specific communication, while talking to an upstream proxy that handles the outside communications.

At the end of the day, organizations are still going to need to work with an upstream proxy to secure their most sensitive assets. That’s why Carbon Black is flexible to your needs.

Existing Sensor Management

Our next feature helps with the transition of existing sensors routed through a different 3rd party provider to the Carbon Black Sensor Gateway. Now, users can swiftly move their existing sensors to route communication via the Sensor Gateway in one click from the Carbon Black UI.

Certificate Rotation

Certificates of both sensors and a sensor gateway will need to be changed at certain periods of time. Whether it’s a forced change from a breach, or part of an organization’s routine update of certification policies. The Carbon Black certification rotation feature is flexible to whatever the scenario. It will update the certificates for both sensors and the sensor gateway, and validate the information before connecting to the cloud – ensuring your sensors are up to date and ready to go.

Additional Resources

To learn more about the Carbon Black Sensor Gateway and to get started, check out the following links: