Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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Proliferation of access levels and number of highly sensitive transactions has brought to fore the importance of identity management in the corporate world. Regulatory requirements are one of the critical factors providing impetus to market growth. Laws such as GLBA, HIPAA, California SB 1386, Sarbanes-Oxley, the USA Patriot Act, and the EU Data Protection Directive require businesses to establish authentic users by employing realistic methods and monitor access to resources, while also protecting user privacy. To meet growing demand, vendors are focusing on end-to-end identity management products to enable businesses to manage identity security issues. Integration of meta-directories and password management into provisioning and tighter integration between Web single sign-on and provisioning solutions are some of the key product trends. Federated identity management (http://www.strategyr.com/Identity_Management_Software_Market_Report.asp) is also fast gaining market acceptance. United...

Tripwire also joined VMware' TAP program Tripwire® today announced that the company has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program to further help IT organizations ensure successful operation of their virtual environments. Tripwire Enterprise 7 assures control of all configuration change across VMware instances in order to provide continuous operational, regulatory and security compliance. According to Andi Mann, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, "Virtualization certainly brings real benefits to business users. But, it can cause issues as well for organizations that do not implement policy-based management tools to administer this new environment. As virtualization increases the risk associated with system failures and "accidental" downtime, it is more important than ever to detect and control configuration change within this dynamic datacenter." Press Release

This indeed can grow if unchecked. "Right now people are bringing up machines without management knowing – in my company we had 12 added without my knowledge," he said. "We see a lot of customers trying to balance their VM count – they're losing control of it. It's like the server sprawl we saw 10 or 15 years ago. "My concern is people will bring up unlicensed machines, and that's a big fine for willful infringement." He suggested this could even be one reason why Microsoft has sought to limit the number of times a Windows license can be moved from server to server as part of a VM. Well what kind of a manager are you anyways to not have a track of the machines (Virtual or Physical) in your environment? I think this Register story is merely a sales pitch to sell yet another auditing software. While you're on this FUD-Train, buy our software! Remember, admins will never allow (virtual or physical) machines to grow in their environment. Why? Simple...