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How secure is the current practice in virtualisation?

The stampede to employ virtualisation sees no sign of waning in 2009, writes Raj Samani, vice-president of communications at ISSA UK.

Gartner has ranked virtualisation as the number one strategic technology for 2009 and many corporations have already implemented it on the back of green datacentres (reducing footprint and power). This trend will continue, with a recent survey of 200 IT decision makers stating that 90% of respondents will be using desktop virtualisation within five years.

However, by employing virtualisation within your organisation are you “absolutely deluded, if not stupid,” as OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raat claims? Such delusion is apparently borne from consumers assuming that software engineers, who are unable to produce operating systems or applications without security holes, can suddenly produce virtualisation layers without security holes.

We should be seeing virtualization as another platform, something that has to be managed and secured as you would another platform like Linux/Unix or Windows. We should be considering not only security patching and applying hot fixes, but also locking down the infrastructure, just because I virtualize my Windows server does not mean I do not need to secure it the ways I did in the virtual world.

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