The Virtualization Knowledge-Gap

Interestingly, these two sectors, which seem so reluctant to implement new virtualization technologies, don’t seem overly concerned about securing the virtual machines they already have. In the Financial Services industry, “Security of Virtualized Infrastructure” was listed as a top IT security concern by only 16 percent of respondents, and only 12 percent in Healthcare, compared to an overall average of 14 percent. Why the disparity? The answer could be attributed to the attitude of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

Kaspersky Lab has previously reported that a large portion of IT professionals lack a strong understanding of virtualization security. The survey found at least one-quarter of all IT professionals had “no understanding” or “a weak understanding” of their virtualization security options, and the vast majority of existing virtualized infrastructure was being protected by traditional “agent-based” security. Agent-based security is the same style of security used to protect physical endpoints, but can result inperformance issues and security gaps when applied to virtual machines. Based on this data, we can
theorize that IT providers in the compliance-heavy Financial Services and Healthcare sectors are concerned that adding new virtual platforms to their networks may require virtualization-specific security measures, which they don’t fully understand.

If this theory is correct, IT departments in the Financial Services and Healthcare sectors aren’t reaping the potential benefits that virtualized infrastructure can bring to their networks based on a fear of unfamiliar security technology creating compliance issues and other risk-factors. Modern virtualization security platforms, based on agentless and light agent approaches, can actually reduce the complexity of managing virtual networks, boost overall network performance and can be customized to ensure that security requirements of compliance regulations are fully met. Kaspersky Lab’s business center offers a number of resources to help explain different styles of virtualization security, as well as security and legal compliance whitepapers and other guides to help CISOs deploy the best virtualization platforms across their network.
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