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Static Security? It's Virtualized Dynamic Security



Greg talks about the shift! The Shift!

Virtualization promises to clearly demarcate security technologies into two camps: 1) the dynamic and 2) the dead.

Now lets talk about some of the specific challenges that virtualization is bringing to security vendors.

THE NEW HYPERVISOR LAYER REQUIRES NEW SECURITY THINKING

The emergence of the hypervisor looks at this point like the biggest thing in IT since the PC; or the equivalent of the first new operating system in 15 years. By decoupling hardware from the OS it has, in effect, created an entirely new data center OS, an entirely new potential for slicing and dicing processing power into virtual machines that can be created, moved, and erased at the speed of electrons.

One of the more subtle outcomes of the hypervisor layer is that the network is now exposed on the server. This is good news and bad news – good in that it allows a new guard post on the servers, which can provide “zone defense” for the VMs without any footprint on the VMs; bad in that it presents a new target that can be exploited by hackers. It has been said that virtualization is changing everything. Security is obviously no exception.


Interesting read!
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