Cloud and virtual environments need the same level of security as physical machines, but necessitate different solutions.
So says Gregory Anderson, Trend Micro country manager, who adds that agent-based security solutions are not designed with virtual environments in mind, and may cause significant operational issues if undue pressure is placed on the ecosystem.
"The only real solution for cloud computing and virtual environments is agentless security solutions," he states. "Agentless technology enables the user to take advantage of what we term 'better-than-physical' protection, where a single platform integrates all security technologies and in turn is able to resolve any operational issues that may arise in the virtual environment."
A physical agent for each virtual machine (VM) may cause unnecessary resource consumption, says Anderson, because these traditional security agents occupy a large amount of memory. Installing multiple security agents on each VM to provide different types of protection may result in increased expenditure, as well as a reduction in VM consolidation ratios, he says.
'Security storms' - sudden scans or scheduled updates performed simultaneously by agent-based devices that do not realise they are in a shared resource environment - can cause a further unwanted load on the system and consequent reduction in overall performance, he adds.
"A VM-specific security threat is that of instant-on gaps, where VMs are activated and inactivated in rapid cycles. What happens here is that it becomes decidedly difficult to consistently provision security to all virtual machines and keep them all up to date," notes Anderson. "A real risk here is that dormant VMs will eventually deactivate so far from the baseline that simply powering them on introduces massive security vulnerabilities.
"Another issue we see is that of the abuse and misuse of operational overheads as administrators need to provision security agents in new VMs, continually reconfigure these agents as the VMs move around or change state, and roll out pattern updates to them on a regular basis. This can be extremely time-consuming and result in security gaps," he adds.
The solution, according to Anderson, is to use agentless security solutions in virtual or cloud-based environments. "An agentless security solution can provide you higher density by offloading security scans from individual VMs to a single security virtual appliance, as well as enable you to optimise your resources by eliminating security storms and resource contention from multiple security agents. In short, an agentless environment simplifies the management of the site by removing physical agents, and in turn, the need to configure and update each one.
"The end result of agentless security solutions for your VMs and your virtualised environment is stronger security that is provided by a solution that provides instant-on protection for new VMs and tamper-proof security co-ordinated by the dedicated security appliance," concludes Anderson.
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