Beyond NSX: A Strategic Alternative for VMware Customers

• Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has created uncertainty, cost escalations, and strategic challenges for NSX users, pushing IT leaders to seek alternatives that enhance security without added complexity.
• Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides a more fit-for-purpose upgrade with deep visibility, true Zero Trust implementation, and AI-powered automation that enables unified protection across hybrid IT environments.
• Transitioning to Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers a low-risk migration path, predictable costs, and superior segmentation capabilities for a more-resilient security posture.

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has become a major inflection point for IT leaders everywhere. What was once a predictable (albeit complex) part of the infrastructure stack is now a source of significant uncertainty, and CISOs and infrastructure managers are grappling with forced product bundling, staggering price hikes, and a growing sense of being trapped.

It isn’t just a pricing issue — it’s a strategic one. This new reality is forcing IT leaders to make a choice: accept a future of escalating costs and rigid terms or seek a modern alternative that aligns with the dynamic needs of the modern business.

Many security leaders are choosing to turn this challenge into an opportunity to move beyond the limitations of NSX, VMware’s network and security virtualization platform for software-defined networking and microsegmentation. Instead, they’re adopting more flexible, effective, and cost-efficient approaches to reducing risk. 

This is where Akamai Guardicore Segmentation emerges not only as a replacement, but as a strategic upgrade.

Since the VMware acquisition, organizations have been reporting platform renewal quotes that are 3x to 6x their previous costs and often bundled with other products they don’t need — but the financial strain is only part of the problem. 

The core challenges of the platform include:

• Limited coverage
• Poor visibility
• Operational complexity

NSX was designed for a VMware vSphere-centric world. It offers little-to-no protection for critical assets that live outside that ecosystem, including bare-metal servers, legacy systems, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, cyber-physical systems (CPS), and modern platform as a service (PaaS) resources. This leaves significant portions of a company’s attack surface exposed.

Relying on Layer 4 (IP/port) visibility is like trying to direct traffic while not knowing the rules of the road. You can’t understand application dependencies, create granular policies that follow the workload, or detect sophisticated attacks that misuse legitimate ports.

Managing separate, cumbersome policies for on-premises, cloud, and containerized environments is a drain on resources and a recipe for human error. This complexity slows down the business and makes a consistent security posture nearly impossible to maintain.

Migrating from NSX to Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a fundamental shift to a more intelligent and comprehensive security model. 

Four of the benefits that the platform provides are the abilities to:

1. See everything from the data center to the cloud
2. Protect everything using true Zero Trust across your entire estate
3. Simplify everything with AI-powered policy and automation
4. Gain predictable value from a licensing model that makes sense

You can't protect what you can't see. While NSX is limited to IP addresses and ports, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides deep Layer 7 visibility down to the individual process level. This means you see not just what is being communicated, but precisely which application or process is communicating it. 

This granular, real-time map of your entire estate — across every environment — allows you to build policies based on application behavior, not just network constructs.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation further enhances these capabilities with new AI-powered features that drastically simplify and accelerate segmentation, ensuring swift workload isolation and reduced lateral movement risks across your infrastructure.

Your infrastructure is heterogeneous, but your segmentation solution shouldn’t have to be. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation delivers a single, unified policy engine that protects every asset, regardless of where it resides: VMs, containers, bare-metal servers, cloud instances, and even legacy systems that other solutions can’t touch. 

Building on this solid foundation, Akamai’s other Zero Trust solutions work together to verify every access request based on identity, context, and risk. We combine microsegmentation, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to combat persistent threats like ransomware, ensuring consistent protection across your entire estate. 

As a result, you can achieve a consistent Zero Trust posture everywhere, closing the dangerous gaps left open by NSX.

Building and maintaining segmentation policies shouldn't require an army of experts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s AI-powered engine analyzes traffic flows and recommends policies, dramatically simplifying the path to enforcement.

The Guardicore AI Assistant, a generative AI chatbot, acts as an in-house expert, offering tailored advice on segmentation and Zero Trust. AI Labeling automates asset classification by analyzing workload behaviors, which enables fast, scalable, and intuitive policy enforcement.

Intuitive wizards and attribute-based rules simplify management even further, allowing you to create powerful, granular policies that are easy to manage and adapt as your environment changes.

In contrast to VMware's forced bundles, Akamai offers a flexible, per-asset licensing model. You only pay for what you need to protect, and only for the capabilities you want to use. Our more flexible approach gives you a predictable, transparent total cost of ownership (TCO) and helps ensure that your security investment scales directly with your business needs, without any superfluous add-ons.

We understand that migrating a core security control sounds daunting. That’s why we’ve perfected a seamless, four-step process that ensures a smooth transition with zero downtime or gaps in your security posture.

Our experts work with you to deploy Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in parallel with NSX, use its superior visibility to model and refine a more effective policy, and only decommission NSX once you have a demonstrably stronger security posture in place.

A large U.S. health insurer that was struggling with the scale and complexity of NSX in their hybrid-cloud environment made the switch to Akamai Guardicore Segmentation. In just four months, they achieved unified security across their entire estate, replaced brittle rulesets with intuitive policies, and successfully sunsetted NSX with zero business disruption.

The changes at VMware are a clear signal that the old way of doing things is no longer sustainable. Staying with NSX means accepting a future of higher costs, greater complexity, and persistent security gaps.

In contrast, moving to Akamai is a strategic decision to regain control. It’s an opportunity to implement a more effective, efficient, and comprehensive security architecture that protects your entire business, not just one part of your data center.

Ready to explore your strategic exit from NSX? Contact us today for a personalized demo and migration assessment.