As more and more businesses move towards virtualization, physical data centers are going the way of the Buffalo. Once a data center has been virtualized, an integral part of the network is moved from the physical island of computing resources into the virtualization software. Inspecting traffic is more challenging when it is self contained in a virtual environment, and as a result, security is all too often voted off the island.
As data center virtualization scales, there are 3 critical security roadblocks your organization needs to address:
1. Network policy and service level assurance
Once data has been transferred to a virtualized environment, the previous network policies must be adjusted. Typically, network policy configuration is tied to a physical port, but with virtualization, machines move across physical servers and are no longer bound by static policy configurations. This has the potential to cause serious network and security problems, especially for businesses that fall under strict compliance rules.
To combat this, companies must configure their environment so that when virtualized traffic shows up on a port, its policy can be looked at and adhered to properly.
2. Management blind spots and network outages
The majority of today’s security tools are based on IP addresses instead of identity, which means that application and network activity must be tied back to specific individuals, servers, or devices. In virtualized environments, the physical boundaries once created (continue reading…)
Article source: http://www.thesecurityblog.com/2012/04/don%E2%80%99t-let-your-data-center-security-get-voted-off-the-island/
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