For secure virtualisation, four is the magic number

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Earlier this week, the respected analyst firm Gartner warned that almost two thirds of virtual servers are not as secure as their physical counterparts.

Gartner’s warning is timely: the firm believes that 50 per cent of enterprise data centre workloads will be virtualised by the end of 2012. If businesses continue to deploy virtual systems, but do not improve security, then they risk creating significant new vulnerabilities.

As Neil MacDonald, a vice president and fellow at Gartner, points out a compromise in a business’ virtualisation set up, the virtualisation layer, could bring down all the hosted software that runs on top of it. A single vulnerability exploit could bring down an entire business, if it depends heavily on virtualised IT.

But the point Gartner makes is not new. Virtualisation experts have warned for some time that, unless done well, the technology increases the chance of failure.

High availability and resilience demand redundancy. Virtualisation, on the other hand, can create new single points of failure.

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