| More and more companies today are starting to virtualize their server farms. One of the main drivers of this is to make for easier deployments, save rack space, utilize existing servers better, and to save costs. IT engineers are seeing all the benefits of virtualization, but often times forget to look at some of the downsides to it and rush their virtualization infrastructure from testing to production way too quickly.
There have been a lot of technological leaps in the virtualization realm in recent |
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| years. There is one aspect of virtualization however that still requires some catching up to do. Security application virtualization is something that IT engineers are not fully thinking through during the planning phase and often time deployments go through without having their security application software reviewed. While virtualization will help save on hardware costs in the long run, many times it can be costly in the short term if security application virtualization is done correctly.
Security applications need to be installed on each virtual machine. This means that the more VM’s you have on a physical server, the more security application licenses and installations you will need. This cost is often either overlooked or the security application is not installed on each VM leaving several virtual servers unsecured. Not only is the monetary cost overlooked, but also the cost in processing power that you are asking of each physical server when you multiply the security application requirements across the board. Hopefully there will be some strides made in this realm in the next few years. Security application software developers are working on ways to virtualize their software in the same way that operating systems are virtualized. This will hopefully allow not only lower monetary costs for licensing, but will also make for more secure virtualization farms. But, don’t expect to see security software vendors quick to release virtualized applications when they are making a lot more money on the seperate agent licenses needed today. In the meantime, secure your VM’s with your security applications properly! |
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Aug
13