Cloud Ushers In New Security Frontier

Converging physical and virtual environments will reduce costs

Not content with targeting initial virtualisation deployments, Shavlik said his company’s next step is to converge the management of physical and virtual environments into one resource.

“They’re the market of people who are already using virtualisation and now they want to lower the management costs of it,” he explained. “An example that we work a lot on is that when a virtual machine is turned off it’s not managed, which is different to physical servers because they’re never turned off – they’re always managed. Sometimes it may be as long as two years, if the virtual server has been used in a test lab for instance.

“Imagine the same thing happening to a physical PC on the network and the viruses that have developed since it was last turned on that it’s not protected against, and the old viruses it may have that will be re-introduced to your network again. Well, imagine that happening every day with virtualisation. In fact, I consider offline images one of today’s main security problem.”

As a result, Shavlik Technologies announced a new security and IT management platform at the end of last month, called “IT.Shavlik.com,” that delivers these services from the cloud. It’s founder told eWEEK Europe that the patent-pending platform would allow companies to harness the benefits of cloud computing, such as affordable licensing and ‘always-on’ software, while at the same time simplifying security and asset cost control.

“In 2008 we formed a dedicated team of virtualisation and web services experts to focus on delivering Shavlik’s IT automation capabilities via the cloud in a truly “IT on-demand” fashion, using our premised based technology that today manages millions of computers. We now have a set of cloud-based technologies that we will deliver both to customers as on demand systems management functions, and to partners as a platform with SDKs [software development kits], on which they can build and deliver their own on demand systems management solutions.”

Shavlik said the company will soon deliver on his converged virtual and physical management vision with software-as-a-service (SaaS) based applications that plug into the IT.Shavlik.com platform for IT services such as patch management, configuration management, asset management and virtualisation management. Shavlik will also be making IT.Shavlik.com available to its larger customers for their private cloud implementations.

The new platform will be made available as a beta offering some time in the fourth quarter of 2009.