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Security & Compliance: Accountability a big issues in Virtual Infrastructure

No you don't have to panic here. you have all the staff in place to take over these replacing responsibilities (note, I didn't say additional since they will eventually have to let go of a lot of old habits and practices, it that offers some relief).

Your Security staff, SOX team or whatever you have in place and/or other folks are the ones who must define standards and frameworks that are compliant to the typical security audit scenarios. Obviously this can also be a means to bring a lot of folks from other domains to participate in the whole "virtualization party" (as it is often, sarcastically mentioned by the guys who have no idea who these "virtualization team" is) actively.

Security is undoubtedly a very improtant arena, in the older world, it just didn't take off. I still remember when I was pushing , that was 7 years back, some auditing practices that could give us more granular control on operational FGAC on the databases, people just looked at me like "Are you nuts?". I found out that there were no security standards and if they existed they were never put into practice.

Although I still believe that we are a bit too late with the security push into the virtualization party, this is fortunately being taken very seriously while we move towards the Cloud Computing discussions, which I often call the Virtualization 4.0.

Anyways, this survey is definitely interesting:



Despite differences in organizational size and structure, and the inevitability that the terms “ensuring” and “responsibility” can mean different things to some people, a greater consensus should be expected on the questions of who within IT is answerable for security, change control and compliance on virtual servers. Even across respondents representing Operations and Security, neither group overwhelmingly considered themselves responsible.
Source

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