Security Is Numero Uno Business Objective Among VM Firms

You’d better pay attention to this, cloud cowboys!

Seventy-seven percent of VM firms have security intensive environments with more than 90 percent of workloads requiring protection, Altor Networks found in a survey.

Despite moving forward with virtualization, survey participants acknowledged they are mixing workloads of varying importance on the same virtual machine hosts and that their efforts to secure them would benefit greatly from solutions that bridge the gap between physical and virtual security.

More than 70 percent are mixing workloads on the same hosts and well over a third believe that the best way to secure them is with solutions that unify physical and virtual network management constructs into a single view.

The survey was conducted among 200 companies at VMWorld by Altor Networks, a provider of security for virtualized data centers and clouds, with Juniper Networks.

The survey participants were also asked about how often changes like VM additions or deletions take place in their virtual networks with 55 percent reporting changes occurring multiple times a day.

This rate of change far exceeds what is possible in a physical network and clearly points to the need for automation in the monitoring and controlling of virtualized network security and compliance.

Key findings of the survey include:

– 40 percent cite time to deployment and cost as leading considerations in the virtualization of their critical workloads.

– 86 percent consolidate mixed workloads (e.g. Web, App, DB) and notice amplified security risks, as a result.

– 63 percent respondents state that their virtual infrastructure administrators or network operations staff, not security, is responsible for security.

– 34 percent rank unified management for physical and virtual network security as the most important security concern in their virtual and cloud infrastructure.

Comment by Johnnie Konstantas, vice president of marketing, Altor: We're seeing the majority of enterprises virtualizing their mission-critical workloads concurrently with efforts to find the best way to secure them. The survey reveals the real struggle of today's IT personnel to meet business objectives for increasing operational efficiency while maintaining or fortifying security. The responses are at times surprising in that they reveal workloads at great risk as a result of virtualization and organizations earnest in mitigating that risk as soon as possible.

The survey results reflect the reality in today's IT environments: economic conditions are pushing organizations toward virtualizing ahead of risk mitigation considerations as a result of a cost cutting mindset.

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