Security of a virtualized environment
More and more organisations are looking to virtualize and consolidate their computer infrastructure to experience the benefits of lower operational costs and increased business agility.
However, as with any emerging technology, virtualization will attract new security threats and it’s a mistake to assume that traditional security approaches can provide an adequate defence. For example, the security gateways that may have existed between physical equipment are not present in a virtualized environment.
Furthermore, the damage in a virtualized environment can be extensive when a virtualized privileged layer of software is compromised, all consolidated workloads are put at risk.
Quick Pitch
Virtualized security appliances are necessary in order to apply the same rigorous access control, authentication and content checking as traditional security appliances from within the virtual platform. Because of the increased risk due to multiple systems being located on a single piece of hardware, security must be a priority area when looking at virtualization and consolidation.
Virtualization touches every aspect of the IT infrastructure – data centres, servers and networks – and security must be factored into the virtualization strategy to ensure that only the right people access the right information at the right time.
Until now, security has not been a high-profile issue in the virtualization software market. But with hundreds of thousands of customers, many of the Fortune 1,000, already using virtual machine server products, vendors are now looking at security solutions for virtualized environments. With the Arrow ECS portfolio of security solutions and our knowledge in this market, your customers can be confident that their corporate security policy is consistently implemented, regardless of the platform on which their infrastructure sits.