Virtualization Carries its Risks

A common strategy for many organizations has been to virtualize its servers, by creating servers that are not tied to a particular piece of hardware. Virtualization provides a measure of flexibility and scalability, but also includes risks that need to be managed. For example, server administration software can allow a single administrator to create new servers. So a company could lose control of even the number of servers it is running. Also, while the virtual servers are not tied to particular hardware, they are in fact resident on some hardware somewhere. The question is whether that hardware is secure.

Questions like this need to be addressed in managing the control environment for a virtual server environment. This article provides a good summary of the issues.