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Data Centers: Virtualization Requires Security Plans to be Rethought
Security plans that worked well with traditional networking and non-virtualized servers don’t necessarily transfer directly to the world of cloud computing and virtualization. Virtualization requires that security measures be rethought.
Virtualization removes the one-to-one mapping between the physical device and server software, and a report by McAfee finds that that decoupling can lead to problems. It can cause problems with the distribution of network traffic and poke holes in security plans that worked well for traditional computing, but which don’t transfer directly over to virtualized machines.
32 percent of IT shops that have moved to virtualization report that the move has resulted in unexpected issues with bandwidth traffic. The McAfee report suggests that the adoption of virtualization also requires that the network infrastructure design be changed to accommodate the needs of virtual computing.
The report also finds that some of the flexibility that virtualization brings introduces new security challenges. A benefit of the use of virtual machines is the flexibility with which a VM can be moved from one physical device to another, allowing for better scaling and more efficient resource utilization. But that flexibility introduces new issues for security. The report finds that virtualization introduces another level of operational complexity and requires new techniques to maintain trust boundaries between virtual machines.