Skip to main content

Compliance challenges while virtualizing

Chris @ Fortisphere writes:

Here are five challenging aspects of IT compliance when dealing with virtualisation:


  1. Discovery and inventory: You can't measure what you can't see (or for that matter, don't even know exists). Determining which virtual machines (VMs) are active, which are abandoned or dormant and what data they are accessing is a fundamental part of defining your scope of compliance and applying the appropriate IT controls. Perhaps of a greater concern is how organisations cope with unapproved or rogue VMs.

  2. Chain of custody: Can you provide an audit trail for critical VMs as they move from development to testing to production? Are only approved changes occurring and are they made by the appropriate personnel? Due to the dynamic and mobile nature of virtualisation, keeping track of where the VMs are, who touched them and what changed is key for audit documentation and a true lifesaver in incident response scenarios.

  3. Separation of critical assets (especially in a hosted environment): How do you know that customer A VMs are properly segregated from customer B VMs? Are low risk, non-critical VMs being hosted on the same box as high risk, mission critical VMs? Add features like VMotion and DRS in plus some modern storage solutions and there is good chance that things are not so cleanly separated. Having the ability to make VMs aware of their risk profile and location is going to be critical as more organisations adopt virtualisation.

  4. Software license violations: Push-button provisioning has become a huge contributor to virtual sprawl and major corporate licensing violations. This one seems simple but take the case of a software development shop. The vendor tools make it quick and easy to build a server for coding or testing purposes but then you can clone it, copy it and move it and before long there are numerous copies of the OS, applications and development tools floating around. Software inventory and metering will have to learn some new tricks in the context of products like VMware's Lab Manager.

  5. Subject Matter Expertise (SME): Virtualization is being rolled out faster than IT audit staff is being trained. IT compliance and audit professionals have just not had the training and time they need to appropriately understand the role virtualization plays in regulatory compliance. This is an area that can be solved but it will take effort from the vendor community working alongside organisations like ISACA, ISSA, IIA and SANS.
Maybe its time to checkup with John at Fortisphere and ask how they've been faring.

More news here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

Virtualization: GlassHouse hopes to cash in with its IPO!

GlassHouse Technologies Inc. on Tuesday registered to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering that, despite the company's financial losses, could prove a hit with investors drawn to its focus on "virtualization" technology. The Framingham, Mass., company offers consulting services for companies that use virtualization software to improve the performance of corporate servers and cut costs in their data centers. GlassHouse also provides Internet-based data storage. "Software-as-a-service," or SaaS, companies and vendors of virtualization products have proved popular among investors in recent years as corporate customers seek alternatives to conventional packaged software. GlassHouse, with roots in both sectors, will test the strength of that interest, said Peter Falvey, managing director with Boston investment bank Revolution Partners. "It will be a bit of a bell weather," he says. "It's not as though it's the 15th SaaS m...