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Kaspersky Offers Balanced Security Approach for Virtual Environments

Kaspersky strives to hit the right mix of performance and protection when it comes to securing VMs.

• By Christa Ayer
• 04/30/2014

Organizations trying to protect their virtual networks with security software designed for physical environments risk performance drag and security exposure. For example, agent-based solutions can be slow as well as leave systems vulnerable through what's known as an "Instant On Gap," that window of time after a VM spins up, but before the agent on that VM downloads the latest security updates. Depending on how many users are simultaneously downloading updates to their individual VMs, and how many days' worth of updates there are to process, this window of vulnerability can be minutes, sometimes hours.

Faster, agent-less solutions have a dedicated virtual appliance perform security tasks away from the VM. But, while agent-less security systems effectively protect file-based activity, they don't protect against web-borne malware, such as worms or other advanced threats that can penetrate the system processes of virtual endpoints and spread across a network.

To help balance performance and protection, Kaspersky is introducing Kaspersky Security for Virtualization | Light Agent, designed for VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft virtualization platforms. This light-agent approach provides a dedicated virtual appliance at the hypervisor level to handle almost all resource-intensive security processing. All network traffic runs through this up-to-date appliance, protecting the VMs with the latest security updates the instant they spin up. There's no need to push redundant copies of anti-malware databases across the network to each VM. Kaspersky Lab's intelligent scanning also ensures the same file isn't scanned multiple times, freeing up additional system resources.

Kaspersky Security for Virtualization | Light Agent is available in the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and the Middle East. Full commercial availability for all global regions will occur during the next several weeks.