Security critical for VM expansion

Although your current crop of security tools can monitor the physical hosts for your virtual machines, they are blind to what's happening inside the world of hypervisors. For that you need to harvest another set of security applications. As such, IDC estimates IT shops will spend up to $2 billion protecting virtual machines from attacks.

Next week Reflex Security Inc. in Atlanta will update its current offering for your virtual systems' security. Called Reflex Virtual Security Appliance (VSA), the version 7 upgrade to the software adds new real-time features that correlate events inside your virtual environment to determine where your problem-child VMs exist and what inside the VMs is going wrong. It also gives you a complete inventory of what's running in your virtual world.

David de Valk, Reflex's executive vice president of field operations, says without improved security, the rush to deploying VMs might stumble. He points to a study by the credit card industry that showed while 75% of the nation's largest retailers have embraced virtual technology, a mere 5% have used it where the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) is applicable. In other words, VMs are not trusted for business-critical applications.

Reflex VSA v 7 also adds a cool new feature that lets you use a slider bar in the tool to, in de Valk's words, "take you back in time." He says the "context" feature can show you every event and alert that occurred from a given moment. This, he says, can be important if you let VMware's VMotion tool move your VMs about your physical infrastructure at will where security may not always be the same.

VMs have changed the security game, says de Valk. "The new perimeter is not your old physical network, but your new consolidated logical network." Which, he claims, needs a different kind of protection.

Reflex VSA, currently available for VMware with other hypervisor support in the works, starts at $1,295 per dual-socket CPU.