Five Key Challenges for Virtualization Security

Today's hottest IT field of non-cloud computing, none other than its rapid development momentum can be used to describe the crazy. Even the giants of the traditional IT industry have also been transferred to them, however, emerging technologies always have some unsatisfactory shortcomings. Xiaobian next to simply sum up the five key challenges facing cloud computing technology.

Data management

Before introduced many kinds of data governance methods, principles and processes. Basically, businesses have a lot of sensitive data that needs to be monitored and protected. This type of data and the key message it generates is the blood of the business organism. Therefore, losing control of data is absolutely unacceptable and can have catastrophic consequences. The DLP (Data Loss Prevention) market exists precisely to protect the data and information in your business. The most important point is that businesses must comply with many of the rules that govern data governance. But today's cloud computing market encourages businesses to migrate data to the cloud, a move that has caused businesses to lose the ability to manage their data sets. They will have to rely on service providers to keep their data secure.

I do not like to quote the abbreviation ILM (Information Cycle Management), but most data governance is about it:

- Create and receive

- Allocate

- use

- Maintenance

- Configuration

So, who will solve this problem? As far as I know, no one except the service provider itself can really solve this problem. Securing customer data and providing data protection and limitations are indeed the responsibility of service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.

Easy to manage

There are already some pretty good IaaS and PaaS products available on the market, including Amazon's web services (S3, EC2, EBS, etc.), Google's App Engine, and Salesforce's Force. com, Joyent and many more. However, most of these belong to the original infrastructure and platform, and do not have strong management capabilities. This is normal. Throughout the history of computing, primitive functions are usually the first to appear on the market, but as competition intensifies, how to manage these primitive functions becomes a watershed supplier. Blade servers and virtualization are the best examples of this trend. Hypervisor was once a key enabler of enterprise virtualization, but at the moment this component is giving way to management capabilities, which has become a major competitive point for major virtualization vendors.

The same is true for cloud computing. An example of a lack of cloud infrastructure management capabilities is automatic scaling. Amazon EC2 claims to be flexible and agile, but in fact it just means it has the potential to be flexible. Amazon EC2 does not automatically adjust your application if your server is heavily loaded. Developers still need to manage scalability issues.

So, who can solve this problem? Many startups already recognize the need for early management and have developed management capabilities on their existing cloud infrastructure and platforms. RightScale is an early pioneer in this area. Their solution addresses many management issues, such as auto-tuning and load balancing.

3. Monitoring

Monitoring, be it performance or usability, is central to any IT organization. We are not talking about how much CPU or memory is used, but the performance of the transaction, disk IO, and other factors. In virtual environments, CPU and memory usage are misleading most of the time. The only real measure is the execution time of your business and the delay. Amazon sees a 1% reduction in sales every 100ms; Google has found that a 50% reduction in web search add-on times can reduce network traffic by 20%; a securities firm's pips trading platform is slower than its competitors Millions of seconds, he may lose 4 million US dollars in revenue.

So, who will solve this problem? Hypernic's CloudStatus is the first product to recognize this problem and develop a solution. They started with monitoring search company web services and recently added Google App Engine. In addition, RightScale's solutions also provide hypervisor management.

4. Reliability and availability

In fact, there is good reason why businesses are still not at ease relying on cloud infrastructure / platforms to run their own businesses. For the time being, cloud technology providers offer almost no SLAs (security level agreements). Even Amazon's Jeff Barr said AWS only provides SLAs for S3 services. I have not started to study to what extent the issue of SLA has been reached. However, if this is true, I think at least it is one of the main factors if it is not considered the single biggest factor affecting the use of cloud computing by enterprises. Do you think a business user signs a contract with a cloud provider that does not explicitly define an SLA? It's like using the data center to host their business-critical infrastructure without clearly defining the SLA.

We all know that SLA protects your interests and minimizes your losses. In most cases, in the event of a network crash, the company will receive reimbursement from the supplier, depending on when the system is down. SLA does not include business losses. Nonetheless, the SLA deals with the issue of risk transfer. As long as there is a well-defined SLA, the user is reasonably manageable when the network / site is paralyzed. If there is no SLA, then only by the company's CIO or CSO back to the black pot.

So, who will solve this problem? As far as I know, it is not there yet. Maybe some startups will likely find some clever ways to provide SLA services as third-party vendors; or cloud technology providers will recognize the problem and take some practical steps to encourage businesses to adopt cloud technologies.

5. Virtualization security

Security is a huge area that includes many different things, such as standard enterprise security policies for access control, activity monitoring, patch management, and more. Most importantly, virtualization security is something that most businesses have just begun to want but do not fully understand. Many IT people still believe that hypervisors and virtual machines are safe. Recent Blackhat demonstrations have shown that we should not be so relaxed. As IT departments become more aware of virtualization security issues, virtualization security issues will become a factor they need to consider as they consider migrating to the cloud. Virtual infrastructure access control and monitoring will be the first to be considered.

So, who can solve this problem? Many start-up companies such as Reflex, Blue Lane and Catbird have developed special VA and claim to be able to protect VA running on VMware ESX servers. However, when you consider using these solutions, you must carefully study their performance. Other start-up companies have started to develop some interesting solutions by protecting the actual virtualization infrastructure. For example, how do you protect and monitor your access to your ESX server? How do you use Live Migration or VMotion to control and monitor the activities of virtual machines.

Cloud computing has arrived. It will be the guide for next generation technology and will eventually be accepted by all businesses. However, the entire cloud computing industry needs to address some of the challenges and eliminate business concerns.