Securing Virtual Machines Starts With Sound Policies

The ease and speed of deploying a virtualized environment has allowed some IT professionals to overlook security concerns that may be brewing up in the cloud.

At WorkflowOne, a provider of marketing services, the IT department realized it had to play catch-up to address new security risks. The potential for a sudden appearance of several virtual servers caused confusion and alarm among the security team, says John Dattalo, an information security analyst with the company. One feared scenario: That the team would come back from lunch to 10 new servers and not know where they came from or what they were for.

So, where should you start? The answer is more simple than you might think: exactly where you would in a conventional environment. "Having a strong [security] policy and adhering to and enforcing that policy are the first steps," Dattalo says. Making sure your processes are up to date is also important, says Natalie Lambert, an analyst with Forrester Research. When virtualization first became popular, few companies included security in their assessments of whether to deploy the technology. But now IT managers are seeing the risks and taking the steps to correct the oversight, Dattalo adds.

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