What’s Virtualization Security? | Liquid Web

The scales are tipping—and shortly enough, most network servers can be virtualized. On the one hand, this implies cheaper infrastructure and maintenance in addition to agility for enterprise networks. Then again, it also implies that legacy hardware-based security solutions (e.g., traditional firewalls, routers, switches, etc.) have gotten outdated. 

As your organization adopts virtualization, it’s vital that it also adopts virtualization security and cloud security to assist keep your network, sensitive data, and users protected in a virtualized environment. Keep reading to learn all about virtualization security, including its advantages, the risks involved with going virtual, and the very best practices for security virtualization.

Virtualization security (also often called security virtualization) is a software-based network security solution built to guard virtualized IT environments. Virtualization—or deploying software-based security resembling next-generation firewalls or antivirus protection rather than hardware—is quickly becoming the fundamental way organizations construct out their network infrastructure. 

• Server virtualization.
• Desktop virtualization.
• Storage virtualization.
• Network virtualization.
• Application virtualization.

Deploying rigid hardware-based network security solutions doesn’t provide comprehensive protection in virtualized environments. As a substitute, you have to implement a versatile, dynamic virtual security solution to match your recent infrastructure needs.

Virtualization and security go hand in hand, as there are inherent security benefits baked into virtualization. For instance, virtualization allows for data to be stored in a centralized location reasonably than on unsanctioned or insecure end-user devices. 

Other positive effects of virtualization security include:

• Granular Access Control: IT teams and admins have rather more control over network access than with a legacy hardware-based infrastructure. Teams can use micro-segmentation techniques to grant user access to specific applications or resources on the workload level.
• Application Isolation: A key security advantage of virtualization is the power to isolate applications from each other on the network. Keeping apps isolated can protect data from being shared across them, or from malware or viruses which will have infected other parts of the system. Isolation is usually completed via containerization and sandboxing. 
• Increased Control Over Desktop and Application Updates: Operating systems (OSs) and applications are continually going through security patches, but your employees won’t be maintaining with these updates on their devices. By virtualizing desktops, IT may have full control to make sure OSs and applications are updated. 
• Virtual Machine (VM) Isolation: Running several virtual machines on a single server allows for a high level of isolation. If security is compromised inside one server, this separation provides protection for the opposite virtual servers.
• Network Isolation and Segmentation: Independent workloads or apps on a network might be divided and shared across segmented virtual networks which are isolated from one another. This ensures that information and access aren’t shared across your entire network. 
• Hypervisor Maintenance: Hypervisors that create and run VMs typically require fewer resources than hardware-based solutions, giving them a smaller attack surface. Plus, hypervisors often update routinely. 

While there are several security advantages to virtualization, there are also a couple of inherent virtualization security issues that you have to be aware of. These risks include:

• Increased Complexity: Virtualized environments might be complex, especially as several workloads and apps are migrated across different servers. This makes it harder for IT teams to follow virtualization security best practices and maintain consistent policies or configurations across your entire network.
• Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) Vulnerabilities: When using VLANs, network traffic is routed from the hose to a firewall, which might result in network latency. Moreover, communication between multiple VMs on a VLAN can’t be inspected, rendering it insecure.  
• VM Sprawl: VM sprawl occurs when there are unused and unaccounted-for VMs present in your system. Because VMs are really easy to deploy, many IT teams spin-up too a lot of them—often deploying one for testing purposes and never deleting it after it’s not needed. Unused VMs are sometimes ignored and don’t receive security updates, leaving them unpatched and vulnerable to attacks. 
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: No matter their isolation, VMs running on the identical server share that server’s resources (e.g., CPU, RAM, and memory). If a DDoS attack is flooding a VM with malicious traffic to compromise its performance, other VMs on the server will feel the results. 
• Hypervisor Attacks: While hypervisors have relatively small attack surfaces, they will still be compromised. If a hypervisor is successfully attacked, all VMs running on the identical server are in danger. This offers attackers a centralized point of access to focus on. As well as, hypervisor admins oversee their security credentials, which suggests a malicious insider could share these credentials with anyone. 

Your organization’s cloud infrastructure could also introduce inherent network security risks—compounding the risks related to virtualization. 

Security virtualization will help keep your organization’s systems secure, but virtualization alone won’t get the job done. It’s vital that you simply arrange a transparent and actionable virtualization security policy. These are a few of the very best practices for virtualization security you need to adopt:

1. Be sure that your hosts are running the most recent firmware and that each one software is updated recurrently.
2. Ensure firmware for all energetic network elements is up up to now.
3. Arrange automatic updates for all OSs with installation and reboots scheduled for off-hours.
4. Install virtualization antivirus and antimalware software and ensure it’s kept updated.
5. Clearly divide administrator privileges to simply track who has modified what across the system, and follow the principle of least privilege (PoLP) for every admin.
6. Be sure that that each one network traffic is encrypted. 
7. Have a transparent user policy and train employees on best practices for password security. 
8. Make sure that all VMs have a transparent purpose. Delete all unused VMs.
9. Schedule regular backups on your VMs and physical servers, in addition to full system backups.
10. Review and deploy VMware best practices for security.

By deploying these best practices and making the most of the advantages inherent in virtualization security, you may rest assured that your organization will remain secure as you gain all the advantages of virtualization, resembling agility and reduced overhead. 

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