Anti-This, Anti-That, getting into the Virtualization Security Game with Introspection

Virtualization Security vendors are starting to seriously investigate the possibilities of the various introspection APIs available to the hypervisors. Introspection APIs allow security groups to now investigate the security of a virtual network, virtual machine, and other components from without. In other words, why rely on an agent within the VM to protect your network, virtual machine, or components. Instead, we can use these APIs to peer into these components from without the system to be tested.

Security Health Checks

Security baselines and security health checks are an important part of any modern day infrastructure. These checks are done periodically throughout the year, usually ever quarter. In my opinion this is a good thing to check and make sure your security settings are following the guidelines that the company has set out to achieve. Here is where I do have a problem. When setting up the guidelines for the different technologies in your infrastructure it would make the most sense that the people establishing the guidelines need to fully understand the technology they are working with. After all, would you really want the midrange or mainframe group to write the policies and guidelines for the Microsoft Windows Servers in your environment?

Development Tools and Application Servers for the Cloud

Development tools like Eclipse and Visual Stuio are being built to ensur applications can be deployed in to the cloud on application servers. Key challenges include the manageability and scalability of application servers. Innovations include the use of non-java languages like Groovy and Jython and even PHP and Javascript on JVMs, and the final demise of SQL as object caches offer more natural scalability.

Persona Management – User Environment Management by Another Name?

They say there’s no such thing as bad weather – just the wrong sort of clothes. Likewise, there shouldn’t be such a thing as a bad user profile experience – its more likely you’ve the wrong type of profile solution. VMWare View users can undoubtedly look forward to faster logon times, but is that the only thing they need?