“5 Best Practices to Protect Your Virtual Environment”
Latest research from the Yankee Group shows that nearly half of all businesses have virtualized some portion of their data centers. This means there is a very good chance you are in the midst of — or soon will be — a virtualization initiative in order to cut the costs of operating your data center, DMZ, mission critical applications or desktop environment.
Standing in the way of realizing virtualization’s promise however, is security. And going forward with your virtualization initiative without addressing visibility, protection and compliance can prove problematic as malware targeting virtual networks proliferates and standards mandating granular virtualization security become ratified.
This paper lays out five ways by which you can fortify your planned or existing virtualized environment, to ensure it is architected for security, malware suppression, and regulation compliance. [Visit the Archives]
“Alternatives for Securing Virtual Networks”
Invisible networks are spreading within data centers. Virtualization of computing hardware is creating these networks of virtual machines (VMs) within physical servers. Traditional network monitoring and security measures are unable to see or control the growing volume of inter-VM traffic.
Enterprises are increasingly concerned about the risks of virtual networks, which range from undeterred malware exploits to mixing trusted and untrusted systems. Some have scaled back the scope and economic benefits of virtualization. Others tried to apply traditional security to the virtual environment. However, key virtualization technologies such as VMotion from VMware break the models of physical network tools.
Altor Networks created the Altor VF virtual firewall specifically to mitigate the risks of virtual networks, while maintaining the ROI of virtualization. A next generation security solution purpose-built for the virtual environment, the Altor VF monitors and controls inter-VM traffic, enforcing security policies at the individual VM level. Because it was designed from scratch to secure the latest virtualization technologies, it provides the thorough protection and ease of operation missing from traditional physical networking products and workarounds. [Visit the Archives]
“The Need for Virtual Network Analysis”
Virtual systems communicate over virtual networks as well as over physical networks, however. This opens up gaps in traditional physical network analysis and security. Administrators of virtual systems need purpose-built tools capable of seeing and analyzing virtual network traffic in order to troubleshoot and audit their systems. [Visit the Archives]
“Secure Virtualization for HIPAA Compliance”
While some of the HIPAA compliance requirements like password restricted access carry over with a transition to virtualization, other requirements like audit and access control do not automatically move from physical to virtual environments. As a result, recent HIPAA audits and penalties for non-compliance have IT organizations re-evaluating their security best practices to ensure compliance in a virtualized data center. [Visit the Archives]
“Secure Virtualized Hosting”
Co-location and hosting environments are ideal candidates for virtualization since server consolidation can curb the appetite of even the most power hungry racks. Hosting providers can further benefit from virtualization by adding new service offerings like backups and disaster recovery.
But more widespread adoption of virtualization by co-location and hosting providers has been curtailed by the security demands of these shared environments. While servers from the same customer can be consolidated onto a single physical server, this approach is far from the flexible and secure compute grid where administrators can match processor, memory, and other resources to servers’ computational needs. To achieve this level of flexibility, administrators must have granular visibility into and control over every VM in the environment.
A SAS-70 certified hosting provider who requires security features such as audit trails and IDS/IPS capabilities cannot fully commit to virtualization without integrating security best practices into the virtualized data center. [Visit the Archives]