Gartner says 60% of virtual servers less secure than the physical servers they replace
Gartner Group announced Monday that sixty percent of virtual servers are less secure than the physical servers they replace, according to an article at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/031510-virtual-server-security.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_daily_am_2010-03-16, although they say that will improve over time.
The reason? “Many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the information security team in the initial architecture and planning stages.” I find that interesting because when PCs became widespread and in the early days of client server computing, the argument was continuously made that mainframes were much more secure than the new computing environment – because applications were rushed into production without proper security planning in the initial planning stages. (The same held true for backups [business continuity] and disaster recovery.)
It appears that the rush to get the latest thing implemented as soon as possible often bypasses traditional IT infrastructure concerns for security. And that unfortunately we have yet to learn from past experiences. Let’s hope no one gets too badly burned this time.
