Virtualization Security

In order to reduce operating and investment costs as required in today’s era, practices such as consolidation and virtualization are more and more used. In this way, it is possible to concentrate all physical servers at the data center and enable the execution of applications by virtual machines (VMs).

Risks:

There have been numerous cases where the organizations’ security has been compromised due to the implementation and support of Virtualized environments. The causes for this vary, with "rogue VM machines" being a representative example, since there was no control mechanism for creating and managing VMs in a system. In some other cases, machines were not updated with the latest Patches and hence vulnerabilities in the operating system were hidden. Finally, in most cases the Virtualized infrastructure has not been designed according to security standards, thus exposing sensitive information, such as databases, without access permissions.

Solutions:

Virtual Firewalls, Load Balancers, Virtual Antivirus, Virtual Intrusion Prevention Systems, Authentication Mechanisms.