Provide security protection for your Virtual Machine

Blue lane technology introduces an intrusion defense system designed for virtual machines running on the vmware infrastructure3 platform.

As virtual machines are widely used, people should use this new technology to improve security and avoid new security threats. On Thursday, blue lane technology held the same view when introducing the intrusion defense system designed for virtual machines running on the vmware infrastructure3 platform.

The company's virtualshield software is set between host management programs and its virtual machines. It can prevent malware from accessing virtual machines. We all know that virtual machines are vulnerable to attacks if they are not updated in time. "The software acts as a protection facility before the server image; that is equivalent to 'a-ha' after the product," said jeff palmer, president and ceo of blue lane, although the virtual shield can only be applied to virtual machines at present, blue lane will soon continue to develop kits for the management programs of other software vendors.

"In other words, virtual shield is able to provide" regional defense "for all virtual machines in the system, rather than one-on-one defense," said allwyn sequeira, senior vice president of product operations at blue lane. "We can simulate packet behavior, so although we don't change the packet itself, we don't need to touch every server ."

Virtual security is not the only virtual security software, but the launch time is appropriate. According to informationweek research, 150 of the 2/3 senior it executives surveyed said their company was about to implement server virtualization. Idc reports that more than 2/3 of American companies with more than 1000 employees are using virtualization technology. Given that major linux applications are beginning to support virtualization technology, we believe this number will grow.

Earlier this week, red hat released red hat Enterprise Edition linux 5 with xen open source management programs. Also in the same week, its rival novell claims that sap netweaver and mysap Business Kits can now be applied to virtual machines running on suse linux Enterprise Server 10. Suse linux Enterprise Edition Server 10 is released together with open source xen. Ibm has also developed a security extension called shype, which can bind security policies with virtual machines. Ibm also provides part of the shype source code for xen.

In a virtualized environment, IP addresses change as virtual machines are created, unbound, or transferred from one physical server to another. Andreas guest opoulos, an analyst at the nemertes Research Center, said that because most security software assigns an IP address to each location, it is difficult for firewall and intrusion defense systems to recognize the necessity of maintaining Virtual Machine security. "There is no problem with virtualization technology, but there are security software problems," he added.

Paul asadoorian, Chief it security engineer at Brown University, is most concerned about how many other virtual machines on the same server can be infected with an infected virtual machine. "Many people connect their servers to the Intranet, but still allow virtual machines on the server to access the network," he said. This violates the original intention of disconnecting the server from the Internet. Reflex security companies discovered this problem and sold it to virtual security appliance. The latter's main business is to establish and maintain the security policies of virtual machines, and even establish and maintain virtual networks.

In fact, virtual machines can improve system security in many aspects. A virtual machine can run different applications on a master server to prevent attacks such as cache overflow from crashing the entire server. This is because the system allocates a certain amount of memory space for each virtual machine, and they cannot steal memory from applications on other virtual machines.

Virtualization also facilitates system recovery by making the it environment more "portable", said michael prince, Chief Technology Executive of burington coat factory. Now, system recovery has become part of the company's security project. virtualization technology makes it easier for people to rebuild an it environment in the case of an emergency of system crashes, this improves security.

Another aspect of Virtual Machine security is that it can run multiple operating systems on the same server, this creates a variety of environments and won't be completely destroyed by malware targeting specific windows or linux systems.

The advantage of virtual security is that it can win time before companies patch applications and operating systems running on their virtual machines. Although it cannot solve all security problems, the direction is correct.