Cloud Ushers In New Security Frontier

Miya Knights,

Widespread adoption of cloud computing is likely to entail a plethora of management and security challenges, warns original Windows NT developer Mark Shavlik

Preventing history from repeating itself

Fast forward to the end of the first decade of the 21st century. And, with over 10,000 customers worldwide, Shavlik has turned his company’s attention to virtual technology worlds and the cloud.

“We’ve learned to protect our servers,” Shavlik said. “And we probably always did. But I don’t think we’ve managed to learn how to protect under-managed devices like the desktop PC and, for sure, not the mobile phone. Not forgetting embedded devices, like those used at the point of sale. We recognise that if things are difficult and expensive to do, they take a long time to get done. So one of the things we’ve tried to do is make it easy to secure networks.”

But he also said that one of the most problematic developments in virtualisation is the introduction of virtual servers, which can be provisioned to operate at super-fast speeds, but still require the same levels of protection as physical servers. Not to break with a successful formula, Shavlik partnered with the virtualisation market leader, VMware in order to target this brave new virtual world.

“We are looking at different cloud providers too,” he said. “But the cloud providers don’t provide management, so there’s no one to work with yet. So we need to work with the market leader.

“Virtualisation is very powerful and very complex. When you consider in this economic climate that the average physical server utilisation rate is only 20 per cent, it’s easy to see why IT departments like virtualisation, especially as there’s no discernable difference to the end user. But our customers – even larger companies – told us that “the bar’s too high”. So I asked an admin to set up a virtual environment ‘today’ and I watched this person struggle through it.

“So we took every point that he struggled with and automated it. And we’ll continue to evolve its management capabilities, around configuration, patches etc.” Shavlik’s VMware Go product is currently in beta and is designed to provide an easy on-ramp to virtualisation, delivered via the cloud.