Rampant Insecurity
As a run-up to its Gartner Security Summits conferences, Gartner is setting off alarms by claiming that 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they supplant. But fear not, they add, because that gory figure will drop to 30 percent by year-end 2015. Between now and then, however, there will be an assortment of problems because "many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the information security team in the initial architecture and planning stages."
More good news: Gartner VP Neil McDonald says "Virtualization is not inherently insecure." More bad news: The people in charge of deploying virtualized workloads are doing it insecurely because they lack the mature tools and processes, as well as the experienced personnel -- staff, resellers, consultants -- required to get the job done right.
The bottom line: The virtualization proliferation and workloads of different trust levels combined with more mobile workloads all add up to more and more demanding challenges for implementers.
It all looks pretty grim, so you may want to save the day for your company by attending the Gartner Security Summits June 21-23 in Washington D.C., and Sept. 22-23 in London.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/16/2010 at 12:48 PM