Entries Categorized as 'Next-generation Data Center'
by Neil MacDonald | May 15, 2010 | Comments Off
In previous posts, I talked about the need for information security to become more adaptive – adaptive to changes in the threat environment and adaptive to changes in the business and regulatory environment. This is the subject of my ongoing research project on Adaptive Security Infrastructure as a Gartner Fellow. I’ve also discussed how the [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Next-generation Security Infrastructure, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | April 27, 2010 | Comments Off
In a previous post, I talked about the need for security vendors to deliver security policy enforcement mechanisms that span physical machines, virtual machines and into cloud-based computing resources: There future of security controls will be a multi-dimensional hybrid across on-premises physical appliances, virtual appliances, embedded within Cloud-based workloads and delivered as a service by [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Cloud Security, Next-generation Security Infrastructure, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | March 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
Stuck at the airport after two consecutive JetBlue flight cancellations (and hoping the third isn’t cancelled as well), I ran across this recent article on a publicly documented and confirmed hypervisor attack – this time on the hypervisor used in the Sony PS3 (in this cases using a hardware-based timing attack). A different exploit (not [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Virtualization Security Tags: Hypervisor Security, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | March 12, 2010 | Comments Off
I blog quite a bit about virtualization and security. To address the security issues with datacenter virtualization, a large number of smaller, point solution vendors of virtualized security controls have appeared. This helps address the immediate issues (because the larger security vendors have been struggling with the potential disruption in embracing virtualization), but isn’t necessarily [...]
Category: Cloud Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Cloud Security, Next-generation Data Center, Virtual Appliances, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | February 19, 2010 | 1 Comment
I’ve talked with several vendors over the past week that are considering the virtualization of their security controls for placement into a virtualized environment. There are multiple dimensions of how disruptive this change can be: 1) Business model changes and significantly lower pricing for users. Some of them sell hardware-based appliances and are grappling with [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Virtualization Security Tags: Cloud Security, Next-generation Security Infrastructure, Virtualization Security, VMsafe
by Neil MacDonald | January 27, 2010 | 5 Comments
One of my frequent blog posting topics is virtualization security. Virtualization isn’t inherently insecure, but in many cases, it is being deployed insecurely. The latter is a result of the relative immaturity of our tools, processes, staff and service providers. Also, in many cases, information security isn’t proactively involved in the virtualization planning. Survey data [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Virtualization Security Tags: Best Practices, Next-generation Data Center, Next-generation Security Infrastructure, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | January 7, 2010 | Comments Off
I saw this article yesterday on Cisco’s acquisition of Rohati. Gartner’s full analysis will be out shortly, but here are my thoughts. I believe this further confirms what I’ve already stated: Identity-awareness should be a feature, not a product. We don’t need to buy yet another box to add identity-awareness to our networks – it [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Next-generation Data Center, Next-generation Security Infrastructure, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | December 16, 2009 | 3 Comments
I’ve been absent from my normal blogging routine during the month of November attending various Gartner conferences and onsite visits with clients. With travel slowing down for the holidays, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to get around to that I’ll tackle. Back in late August/September, I saw that yet another network access control [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Next-generation Data Center, Next-generation Security Infrastructure, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | August 28, 2009 | Comments Off
As security controls are virtualized (e.g. firewalls, IPS, web application firewalls and so on), one of the more significant concerns is performance and throughput. I remember a demonstration about a year ago where an IPS running in a VM virtual appliance easily consumed 2 out of 8 cores in a multicore system. A 25% overhead [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security Tags: Virtual Appliances, Virtualization Security, VMsafe
by Neil MacDonald | April 18, 2009 | 1 Comment
During the course of my blogging activities, this is the third time I’ve talked about something the security industry should do that I believe is so obvious that I called it a “no-brainer”. The first was in reference to a global, industry-wide effort to create a shareable, standards-based application whitelist database built directly from feeds [...]
Category: Next-generation Data Center Virtualization Security Tags: Hypervisor Security, Security No-Brainer, Virtualization Security, vSphere
