Virtualization Security: Protecting Unique IP

Moving to a nearly fully-virtualized infrastructure in 2008 made Joel Braverman a lot more confident in both the physical and digital IT infrastructure at his (relatively new) employer Universal Audio. As manager of IT and the guy responsible for security on that infrastructure -- one that supports a company whose products are both expensive and almost entirely digital -- it also made him extremely nervous, he says.

To understand what Universal Audio, in Scotts Valley, Calif. does, and its unique IT challenges, you first need to understand that for audiophiles, digital music doesn't quite match the "warm" quality that comes out of analog gear. Universal Audio is one of the leading companies selling digital products that emulate analog gear. And Universal's technology comes as close as any, and far closer than most, to the sound of the original, according to music industry reviewers.

"We sell the DSP boards, but we also do plug-ins that model the physical analog device and makes it sound 99.9 percent like what the original sounded like, even though it's running inside the computer," Braverman says. "One of the coolest things is one that sounds like the exact recording desk Jimi Hendrix made his recordings on. We sell that as a plug-in." Universal Audio also sells software to emulate the custom studio gear of famous audio designers.

Since it's all software, however, Universal Audio's tech makes a hot target for thieves.

"This industry has been struggling with hackers for 10, 15 years, and we're almost the only one whose products have not been cracked," Braverman says. "Our competitors' stuff still sells, but a lot of music that's based on plug-ins has been cracked. If you can get it for free, why would you buy it?"

From a DR Project to Almost Fully Virtualized, Fast UA is a relatively small company-60 employees, working on between 150 and 200 workstations. Audio engineers and coders user far more workstations per head than normal employees, or even normal programmers, Braverman notes.

Two years ago, when UA hired Braverman as manager of IS, its whole back-end infrastructure was running on a set of rack-mounted desktop PCs in an unsecured part of the company's manufacturing unit.

"They went down a lot, and they were just right there, where people could have come in and walked off with them," Braverman says. "We figured, since most of those machines weren't doing anything 90 percent of the time, we might as well virtualize them."

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