With the number of purely physical machines now being eclipsed by sales of virtual machines, the adoption of virtualization technology is without doubt on the increase. The exception to this trend appears to be Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as there is a perception that complexity of the technology and cost are a barrier to uptake.

Many SMEs are still reluctant to adopt the technology due to perceived complexity of management, cost and concerns about integrating it with existing infrastructures. IP-based security and unified threat management (UTM) specialist, Clavister urges SMEs not to be put off adopting virtualization as the benefits far outweigh the challenges.

Andreas Åsander, VP product management at Clavister advises: “Before adoption organizations should ensure they educate themselves on how to exploit the technology and understand how to avoid some of the pitfalls.

“Smaller organisations have begun to accept that virtualization is not the sole domain of large enterprises with large budgets. The decision on whether to virtualize or not depends on the complexity of your IT infrastructure so before making this decision, it is important to conduct a broad review of your current IT environment with particular emphasis on server utilization.”

According to Åsander companies should ensure they also consider and plan for the security element of virtualizing their IT environment: “We recently highlighted the fact that many organizations who have already implemented server virtualization may have left their IT networks open to attack because they wrongly believed that security was built-in.

“In the rush to take advantage of the numerous benefits of virtualization many organizations overlook how it might affect their security policies. Often these deployment projects are headed up by the server manager and the security manager is often brought into the project very late, if at all.

“When companies implement virtualization, it is very dangerous to assume that everything is automatically secure when the reality is that they may be facing new security threats.”

In order to help those organizations who are considering adopting virtualization, Clavister has developed a five-point checklist:

1.	Redefine the security policy to include the virtualization aspect
2.	Use virtual security gateways which run inside the virtual infrastructure
3.	Protect the virtual administration center and only allow access to this from a separate network
4.	Limit the number of administrators having access to the virtualization administration tools to a minimum
5.	Evaluate and test the security level on a regular basis. Replicating the production environment in a test environment is easy with virtualization and this should be utilized

For more information on how to implement virtualization, Clavister has developed a whitepaper on this subject. To download a copy of "Virtualization 101", please visit http://www.clavister.com/products/documentation.html


For more information, please contact:
Maggie Warbrick, Vice President Marketing
+46 8 545 298 10
[email protected]

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