Defense in Depth: Firewalls within the Virtual Environment

The 6/14 Virtualization Security Podcast we spoke about firewall placement within the virtual environment as well as storage based defense in depth. While we covered Encryption on the 5/31 podcast, in the 6/14 podcast we covered other measures when dealing with storage (which will be part of a followup post). This conversation was slightly different than all other firewall discussions, as it was about migrating from a physical environment to a virtual environment, and keeping the same firewall placements. Spurred by a customer, we sought to come to a set of guidelines to follow for defense in depth within the virtual as well as physical and hybrid cloud environments.

When to use a Virtual Firewall

The 2/9 Virtualization Security Podcast was a discussion on when would one use a virtual firewall. This was in response to being told that there are some people that would never use a virtual firewall for anything, and that got me thinking. Outside of the politics involved with using virtual vs physical firewalls, when would you use one? What are the cut offs, and best practices around using virtual firewalls. We were joined by Rob Randell of VMware to discuss this point.

Cloud and Virtualization Security Resolutions for 2012

Christmas is over and New Years is on its way. A time to make resolutions and see the year complete. A time to review what is old and plan for the future. This is a perfect time to review your defense in depth and look to see if there are security additions needed in 2012. So what cloud and virtualization security New Years resolutions should I make for 2012?

Where are my NOC Views: Virtualization Management Vendors

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to many third party management tools. In the past I have been given briefings as well on various VMware, Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen Management Tools as well. Many of these tools are marketed directly for use by the administrator, but they have the tools can be used by more than the administrator. These tools should be marketed to management, administrators, as well as the network operations center (NOC). We need tools that perform continual monitoring and auditing so that we can know as soon as possible when a problem occurs.

Sum of the Parts… Not equal to the Whole

Christofer Hoff (@Beaker) and I had a short discussion on twitter the other day about the VMware Cloud Director (vCD) security guidance. We both felt it was a bit lite and missed the point of Secure Multi Tenancy. However, I feel even more strongly that people will implement what is in the vCD Guidance, vBlock Security Guidance, and the vSphere Hardening Guidance, and in effect have a completely insecure cloud. These three guides look at the problem as if they were singular entities and not as a whole.