Virtualisation Is Real Security Focus At RSA Conference

Several companies are using this year’s RSA Conference to highlight their focus on virtualisation security.

With the show underway, a number of vendors have made announcements with an eye towards protecting virtual environments. Among these companies were Symantec, Trend Micro and Hewlett-Packard, which all announced additions to their virtualisation roadmaps.

Companies Unveil Their Products

In Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 (SEP 12), the company has added the ability to white-list baseline images, randomise scans and updates and automatically identify and manage virtual clients.

“(Virtualisation) is becoming a lot more mainstream, and the security requirements are also changing from what is required to secure or lockdown a physical server to what it takes to lockdown a virtual server,” said Ashish Mohindroo, senior director of product marketing at Symantec in a conversation with eWEEK before the conference. “It has become more complex, and we believe your virtual infrastructure servers have become more susceptible to attacks because now you’re doing virtual sharing between virtual images, now your encrypting these virtual images, how you manage these virtual images… and also how you minimise resource impact on your server.”

The product, which is powered by Symantec’s cloud-based reputation technology and includes a number of other capabilities around data protection, is still in beta.

Trend Micro also announced Deep Security 7.5 Update 1, an update to the initial release from August 2010. According to Trend, the update offers performance enhancements to enable Deep Security virtual appliance to provide agentless intrusion detection and prevention using VMware vShield Endpoint for higher virtual machine density levels.

Hewlett-Packard meanwhile revealed plans to work with VMware on Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) solutions optimised for VMware vSphere-based virtual and cloud environments. The idea is to integrate HP TippingPoint IPS with VMware vShield and VMware vCloud Director to deliver unified security management and automate scanning, detection and blocking capabilities.

The companies also plan to jointly market a software and hardware solution that combines the HP TippingPoint vController with VMware vShield App and vShield Edge products.

“With the growth of virtualisation and cloud computing, security requirements have never been more complex and critical to our clients,” said Alan Kessler, vice president and general manager for the Security Products Organisation at HP, in a statement. “Building upon HP’s global strategic alliance with VMware, this expanded relationship is designed to deliver additional innovative security technology for a converged infrastructure, providing protection that is automatic and seamless for our clients.”