VMware AgentMinder And New Agentic AI Security An ‘Amazing Story’ For Customers, 11:11 Systems Explains

“AgentMinder is really important and a great approach from both a governing agent’s perspective and with the concept of zero trust,” says 11:11 Systems CTO Justin Giardina.

VMware’s cybersecurity innovation roared at VMware Explore 2026 with the launch of AgentMinder, which serves as the central control plane for autonomous AI agents, as well as VMware boosting its agentic AI security with new features for vDefend and Avi Load Balancer.

“AgentMinder is really important and a great approach from both a governing agent’s perspective and with the concept of zero trust,” said Justin Giardina, chief technology officer at 11:11 Systems, one of VMware’s top partners.

VMware by Broadcom’s new AgentMinder product serves as the central control plane for autonomous AI agents. AgentMinder independently verifies agent identity and authorizes each action against its declared mission, intent, context, and current risk before the action reaches an enterprise resource.

“If you think about a zero-trust framework in a network environment, it’s based on what role you have in a company, the zero-trust policy that gets sent to your laptop allows you to see and do and access certain things,” he said. “To me, AgentMinder is almost like taking that type of approach and assigning it to an agent. So instead of me getting access to network environments, well now I can almost police the agent and make sure the agent is only able to do things that it’s supposed to do. … What we hear from customers is, ‘How do I know everything’s safe?’ This really cures that aspect of AI safety.”

By establishing policy-based controls, continuous authorization and telemetry, AgentMinder will help 11:11 clients scale agentic AI while maintaining security, compliance and operational trust, said 11:11 Systems Chief Revenue Officer Dante Orsini (pictured).

“Having that role-based access control built in is huge because, for example, how do you keep someone in human resources from accessing the data that the finance team has to access,” said Orsini. “These are real-world problems that VMware is solving for.”

AgentMinder provides a deployment model across platforms like VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud-native Kubernetes platforms.

Broadcom Unveils vDefend Agentic Security Innovation At VMware Explore 2026

AgentMinder was launched at VMware Explore 2026 on Tuesday in Las Vegas.

At the conference, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company also unveiled new features for its popular vDefend and Avi Load Balancer security products inside its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation platform.

VMware vDefend delivers Zero Trust lateral security for AI workloads running on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

At Explore, VMware announced new features, including an extension of vDefend’s lateral security to agentic AI workloads. The product will now automatically identify MCP servers, LLMs, datastores, and tools by continuously monitoring traffic flows across VCF.

Additionally, VMware vDefend now does shadow AI monitoring and can detect unauthorized AI usage and enforce strict Zero Trust policies to help maintain complete control over enterprise environments. Lastly, vDefend will now use an agentic AI pipeline to quickly create Intrusion Detection and Prevention signatures, providing distributed virtual patching to protect workloads against vulnerabilities.

VMware Boosts Avi Load Balancer

Avi Load Balancer delivers AI-aware load balancing, web application security and API protection to agentic AI workloads.

At VMware Explore, the company unveiled new enhancements to broaden its protection of agentic AI workloads including tool and agent misuse prevention that will help restrict agents from accessing unauthorized MCP tools and inspect transaction content to block malicious execution, including remote code execution and file injection.

Additionally, new Avi Load Balancer features include zero-day attack detection by establishing normal agentic traffic baselines across agents, LLMs, and tools to flag and isolate anomalous behavior in real time.

Lastly, new sensitive data protection technology has been added to help prevent unauthorized exfiltration of credentials, personally identifiable information and sensitive financial data.

New AI Security Adds To ‘Amazing VMware Story’

With AgentMinder, VMware vDefend, and VMware Avi Load Balancer, VMware is providing multi-layer cybersecurity solutions designed to govern autonomous AI agents, defend agentic workloads, and protect enterprise Private AI Cloud workloads.

“VMware is doing some really awesome stuff with vDefend in relation to analyzing network traffic, analyzing virtual machines, analyzing agentic AI, and that’s great,” said 11:11’s Giardina.

“But the fact that they also know the entire ecosystem of what you’re running in your environment and can say, hey, this person’s VM showed signs of this vulnerability or is participating in this DDoS. I’m going to isolate it, create a workflow that I can go analyze this, and also recover that while we’re analyzing it—there’s absolutely nothing out there that’s integrated like that and can do things like that,” said Giardina.

“So that’s just one sliver of a benefit that you get from an encompassing solution like [VMware Private AI Cloud],” said Giardina. “And the fact that you can buy that from VMware and get that today—and not have to stitch all the things together if you used a bunch of third parties—that is an amazing story.”