The Scary Side Of Virtualization

Computerworld - At the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders discussion in March, a CIO stood up to demonstrate his confusion about the safety of a practical infrastructure that has subsumed more than half of his company's prolongation servers. Two other IT management team chimed in with their own whinging worries.

None of the management team in that room longed for to confess on the record that they feel vulnerable, but Jai Chanani, comparison executive of technical services and design at Rent-A-Center Inc., feels their pain. "One of my greatest fears is the capability to rob [virtual servers]," he says.

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Getting Worried

How upset is your group with the situation of safety in a virtualized environment?

* Very or extremely: 32.7%

* Somewhat: 36%

* Minimally: 23.7%

* Not at all: 7.6%

Source: TheInfoPro consult of 214 IT safety professionals, November 2010

Chanani's team has about 200 practical servers working as file, print and, in a few cases, focus servers. But, for safety reasons, his emporium doesn't use virtualization is to company's ERP system, databases or e-mail.

Michael Israel, CIO at entertainment playing field user Six Flags Inc., voices a not similar concern. For him, the many unnerving unfolding is a brute administrator relocating practical servers from a secure network portion onto earthy hosts in an unsecured segment, or formulating new, undocumented, unlawful and unpatched practical servers. "The final thing we wish is 25 servers out there that we are unaware exist," he says.

John Kindervag, an researcher at Forrester Research Inc., says he's listened stories from customers who have had VMware's vCenter management console compromised, enabling the assailant to duplicate a practical appurtenance that can then be run to access data. "When you rob a VM, it's similar to you pennyless in to the information core and stole a square of hardware. It's potentially devastating," he says.

"We worked for many years with customers on most appropriate practices that make this a total nonissue," says Venu Aravamudan, comparison executive of product selling at VMware Inc. He says many users residence such risks by subsequent to most appropriate practices such as formulating an removed network portion for handling the resources, and formulating role-based access controls.

The emigration onto practical servers has saved businesses outrageous sums of allowance as a outcome of converging and softened efficiency, but as virtualization gobbles up more and more prolongation servers, a few IT management team are getting indigestion. Has anything been overlooked? Could a inauspicious crack bring down vicious applications -- or maybe an whole information center?

"Customers arise up a day, noticed that that 50% of their business-critical apps reside on practical infrastructure and say, 'Gee, is that secure?' That's really common," says Kris Lovejoy, clamp boss of plan at IBM Security Solutions, a safety consultancy.

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