October 11, 2011, 1:37 PM — More and more enterprise IT shops - as they get comfortable with virtualization practices in their own private clouds - are considering a jump to the public cloud. But before making that leap, consider these pieces of advice from those that have already jumped.
1. Make sure your provider has VM-specific security
"Hypervisors were never really designed to be running in a public environment," says Beth Cohen, senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, a consultancy.
That fact doesn't necessarily stop them from being secure, Cohen says. But it does require a more elastic security strategy that can deal with the issues of virtual machines (VM) moving around the underlying infrastructure, interacting with cloud applications, and supporting multiple tenants.
Customers going into the public cloud need to understand that perimeter security - while it still needs to be in place in any virtual data center environment - isn't going to help with the internal security of virtual machines, says Michael Berman, CTO of Catbird Networks, a vendor that focuses on virtual machine security.
Both Cohen and Berman have pointed potential cloud consumers to VMware's vShield, which is both a product that offers integrated security services to the underlying VMware hypervisor and a set of APIs that allow third-party security vendors to build security services on top VMware's platform.
VMware's Dean Coza, director of product management for security products, points out that a dozen security vendors announced products that tap into vShield to deliver virtual machine security products at last month's VMworld conference.
But VMware is only one of the virtualization software vendors out there and the company has said very little about how these tools will help lock down other popular VMs from Microsoft and Citrix.
Experts describe the top cloud security concern
2. Figure out a way to lockdown endpoints
