The known virtualization security vendors Reflex Systems, Catbird Security, Altor Networks, HyTrust, Symantec, Trend Microsystems, Tripwire, and VMware all showed their wares at VMworld. Even Checkpoint was showing off their firewall integration within the virtualized environment. Are these really competing products or products that have unique uses within the virtual environment with just a bit of overlap?
TVP Tag Archives
Regulatory Compliance, Slowly Catching up with Virtualization
As of this writing just a few of the regulatory compliance groups are working to encompass Virtualization. However, they are not close to anything publishable yet. What does this mean for companies that must enforce regulatory compliance? What does this mean to an auditor? The big question many are asking, is if the Compliance documents to which they must adhere do not mention virtualization, are they compliant when they virtualize? Currently whether you get down checked or not during an audit depends entirely on the auditor’s interpretation of the current non-specific guidelines. In most case its negative as there is no guidance from the compliance groups with regards to virtualization. There are also virtualization security products out there that try to enforce and report upon current compliance guides with respect to virtualization.
40,000 Firewalls! Help Please!?
While at VMworld I was suddenly hit with a blast of heat generated by the 40,000 VMs running within the VMworld Datacenter of 150 Cisco UCS blades or so. This got me thinking about how would VMsafe fit into this environment and therefore about real virtualization security within the massive virtual machine possible within a multi-tenant cloud environment. If you use VMsafe within this environment there would be at least 40,000 VMsafe firewalls. If it was expanded to the full load of virtual NICs possible per VM there could be upwards of 400,000 virtual firewalls possible! At this point my head started to spin! I asked this same question on the Virtualization Security Podcast, which I host, and the panel was equally impressed with the numbers. So what is the solution?