Security of virtual servers and virtualised infrastructures is driving enterprise data centre security purchases.
This is according to Lutz Blaeser, MD of Intact Software Distribution, who notes virtualisation is one of the top security concerns for IT decision-makers.
As more and more physical assets crucial to the enterprise move to the cloud, the virtualised security ecosystem becomes increasingly critical to the IT decision-maker, says Blaeser.
He points out that in a recent survey carried out in the US by Bitdefender, 15% of companies are now fully virtualised, while another 47% are planning to increase their virtualised assets in the near future.
Infonetics Research states virtualisation is driving enterprise data centre security purchases, with budgets growing 57% from 2014 into 2015.
The market for virtual appliances and virtualisation-aware security solutions is merging with software-defined networking in the data centre, and this combination is driving the market growth, says Infonetics.
Virtualisation provides immediate availability and reliability, but also opens the infrastructure to the outside world, as a result, virtual machines are equally at risk of unauthorised access and malware as non-virtualised ones, notes Blaeser.
He notes security for virtualised environments is fundamentally different from security technologies that sit on top of physical clients.
Installing a security solution that has been designed for physical clients in a virtual machine would dramatically impact the machine's performance.
Organisations, therefore, should have security solutions that have the ability to provide complete insight into virtualised endpoints with zero footprint within the endpoints through inspection at the hypervisor level, he says.
"Like any other area of the IT infrastructure, security should be one of the first considerations in a virtualised environment."
Warren Olivier, regional manager for Veeam SA, says when it comes to virtualisation security, IT decision-makers need to implement security measures based on technical skills - which they are not particularly skilled at or know all that well.
As the virtualisation component becomes more mainstream and open to more people trying to attack it, there are many areas for attack on virtual infrastructure, he says.
"A business disruption, whether planned or unplanned, natural or man-made, can be a time of great vulnerability for an organisation as ordinary practices change, people access applications and data in new ways, and perimeter or endpoint security measures may be compromised. The risk is due to the unknown."
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