RSA Security Extends Compliance to Virtualization

High priority requirement for most large organizations.

In between the cloud rhetoric and virtualization hyperbole at this year's VMworld, I'm starting to see a few significant announcements.
RSA Security made one of these by introducing virtualization intelligence in its Archer compliance suite.

What's the big deal? IT operations needs standard server configurations to meet compliance mandates and auditors need visibility into both physical and virtual servers. Neither group wants to jump through hoops to get what they need. This is a pretty big deal. When ESG asked security professionals what security-specific developments need to take place in order to enable more widespread server virtualization usage, 27% responded that their organizations needed, "compliance management tools that recognize virtual server events." This was the third most popular of all possible responses.

RSA is on to something here. When I move workloads to the cloud you can be damn sure that my auditors want to know what's going on. I'd like to see more vendors follow RSA's lead and I'd really like to see security and cloud computing vendors start to discuss data standards for compliance, event management, and log file formats as well as secure transport protocols. Alas, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The RSA announcement won't get much pick up, as it lacks the buzz of some cloudy/virtualization vision thing. Nevertheless, it is exactly what customers are looking for.

• RSA
• RSA Security
• VMworld