Top 3 Security Challenges of Virtual Infrastructure
Virtualization technologies have been around us for a long time and organizations are increasingly adopting it to optimize resources, for easier backups and disaster recovery, secure infrastructure, load balancing and most importantly, to drive down costs. It has become a critical element of IT services. Some more benefits of virtualization for an organization include:
- Better IT productivity.
- Improved business continuity.
- Better system scalability.
- Cost effectiveness with lower IT unit cost.
- Improved client services.
- Decreased energy costs.
As organizations move to virtualization, they get a number of benefits but they also face few challenges that are specific to virtual environment. Virtual infrastructure must be safeguarded and to secure it, IT professionals must promptly deploy security products to all software components and help ensure that the environment is restricted from unauthorized users.
But some pressing security concerns arise while administrators work to secure virtual infrastructure.
Here’s a look at the three top virtual infrastructure concerns.
1. Operational complexity
Virtualization gives you the ability to provision new virtual machines (VMs) quickly and easily but this frequent creation of VMs might also lead to VM sprawl — an over proliferation of virtual machines. This VM sprawl is responsible for higher operational complexities that IT people face while managing security products and further wastes resources and degrades VM performance too. So, you must have a way of tracking all of the VMs on your network before they compound into a severe problem.
The best solution to this challenge is to turn to an Infrastructure as a Service provider that has virtualization security datacenter platform to solve complexity issues.
2. Challenges to meeting compliance and regulations
Meeting regulatory compliance requirements in virtual environment can be costly, complex, and ever-changing. Virtual infrastructure is designed in such a way that keeping track of network rules and settings become difficult.
Workloads move around the datacenter to different physical machines and sometimes inter-VM traffic bypasses inspection by traditional security devices due to its invisibility to network-based security protection devices. This actually needs to be controlled.
Moreover, environments with strict security concerns such as PCI and HIPAA makes ensuring compliance more difficult.
So, companies are faced with the challenge of achieving compliance while pursuing IT objectives — managing distributed environments, combating targeted threats, enabling worker mobility and supporting new IT technologies like cloud computing and the IT consumerization.
Hence, enterprises should evaluate the need for third-party tools to provide tight administrative controls where compliance requirements dictate.
3. Challenges in auditing security posture
Audits are critically important to bring agility to the business strategies and enterprise systems’ support but in virtual environments, audits become complex due to the abstraction creation that changes the architecture dynamics, administrator privileges and system separation.
Sometimes, due to immaturity of standards and frameworks, or conflicting standards, auditors find it difficult to understand and perform a comprehensive audit of the security plans and sometimes due to the limited expertise in virtualization, they find it difficult to understand the technical intricacies to ascertain security of a specific design or configuration.
Other concerns include security monitoring for hypervisor, vulnerability shielding for system and apps, the inability to enforce corporate security policies while transitioning workloads and inadequate data security and privacy strategies in a multi-tenant cloud environment.
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