Managing security in a truly virtual world

Virtualisation makes security and privacy more difficult to manage. Our latest blog post looks at why this is the case and how we can secure and protect these systems.

Gemma Christie

min read

THE TRADITIONAL DATA CENTRES WE’RE ALL USED TO ARE BECOMING A THING OF THE PAST.

Traditional data centres have felt the disruptive impact of cloud, edge computing, advances in colocation and hosting services for some time. In addition, the advances in the areas of telecommunications, artificial intelligence, operations, hardware and software are transforming enterprise data centres as never before.

MANAGING SECURITY IN A TRULY VIRTUAL WORLD

Many infrastructure and operations leaders responsible for building and sustaining dependable infrastructure are looking to secure and protect their increasingly digital systems. The virtualisation of the data center is provoking fundamental questions about the proper place for network security services.

WHAT IS VIRTUALISATION?

Virtualisation is the process of running a virtual instance of a computer system in a layer separate from the actual hardware. Through virtualisation, multiple systems can be run on a single computer system simultaneously.

Infrastructure Virtualisation is a software-based IT infrastructure hosted on a different physical set-up and serves as cloud computing’s infrastructure model. This is usually attained by small businesses to gain access to enterprise-grade technology servers and applications where circulation is done through the cloud.

Security Virtualisation is the software-based security solution that is intended to work in a virtualised IT environment. Because of virtualisation, it is not like hardware-based traditional security systems that include routers, firewalls and switches.

WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF VIRTUALISATION?

Implementing cloud computing brings many benefits but can also carry several susceptibilities and threats.

Some of the risks involved in virtualisation are highlighted below:

1. HYPER-JACKING

This type of attack is by a hacker who gains malicious control over the hypervisor by creating a virtual situation in the VM host. Through this, the OS is attacked to run the attacker’s programmes. The applications on VM become totally unaware of this malicious presence.

2. VM SPRAWL

This security breach occurs when a huge amount of VMs exist in an environment without appropriate control and management systems. These VMs hold the system resources including network channels, disks and memory within the specific time frame in which these resources cannot be allocated to other VMs so the information is lost due to attack.

3. SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE

VM environments these days are based on hypervisor technology that controls the VM access to physical resources. This is considered to be significant for system operation and functionality. If a single point of failure occurs in hypervisor because of excess use, the faults in software infrastructure lead to the breakdown of the complete system on the whole.

4. VM ESCAPE

VMs support a robust isolation among host and VMs but the susceptibilities within OS processing in VMs can help hackers to add a malicious program inside it. On the running of that program, isolated borders are broken by VM and direct communication with OS starts by by-passing the VMM layer. Hence, the attacker gets a clear way to access the host machine and attacks the important data.

MITIGATING THE RISKS

To safeguard the cloud based virtualisation systems and environment, organisations must implement certain security measures. Some of these security measures are mentioned below for securing cloud execution.

VIRTUALISATION RISKS CAN BE MITIGATED BY:

Securing the network through implementation of a proper VM system
Disabling the unnecessary topologies
Disconnecting the hardware devices that are not usable
Backing up the VM images
Designing complicated, password protected and encrypted configurations
Executing a security patch management process
Solidifying of VMs
Auditing

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital transformation is the process of using digital expertise to build new and innovative systems, or to alter the existing technologies from a business point of view. This can include processes, culture and client experience in order to meet the developing and changing needs of a business. Thus, this kind of reimagining of the business market in the Digital Era is known as digital transformation.

WHY IS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IMPORTANT?

There are many benefits in terms of digitising the IT business market. Some of the key aspects on the importance of digital transformation (DT) have been explained below.

1. ENHANCE SYSTEM PROTECTION

System security is the most significant problem of almost all organisations dealing with IT arrangements. With the emerging IT and IoT based applications on a daily basis, there is a need to ensure customers, clients and even company’s users that their private data is safe and identities are not attacked. In this case, DT helps in providing solutions by enhancing the protection from cyber attacks.

2. IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY

The implementation of DT helps company’s employees the most, providing digital solutions to assist in their tasks, letting them gain better and quick outcomes. With DT, employee’s decision making capability and efficiency is streamlined, which positively impacts a company's overall reputation.

3. GREATER PROFITABILITY

By executing DT strategies and trends including Big Data, AI and ML algorithms, IoT and cloud computing, organisations see the possible enhancement in profitability that aid them in gaining high cost savings.

4. ENHANCED CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

The execution of DT, particularly in organisations related to customer experience, will positively impact on a high scale not only with customer retention, but also gaining better satisfaction rates from their customers.

THE VIRTUAL FORGE AND SPLUNK PARTNERSHIP

The Virtual Forge are a provider of UX and development, data intelligence and cloud services. We help customers to recognise and alleviate the risks when developing new technologies and methods ensuring protection against cyber-attacks, fraud and redundant downtime.

WHO ARE SPLUNK?

Splunk is a software-based platform that is used to search, evaluate, and envisage the machine-generated data in real time which is collected from several websites, sensors, applications and digital gadgets etc. building up the IT infrastructure and business. In other words, it can be said that it is a “Data-to-everything” platform.

We have created a partnership with Splunk to support our clients to explore, analyse and act on their data at any scale. Organisations should be free to pay full attention to their business outcomes and goals, leaving the data collection and intelligence to us.

Using Splunk, IT, Security, and IoT would be able to get an overall complete assessment of their business in real time, turning incoming data into the beneficial business outcomes. Not only this, but it will help in bringing in innovative and recent technologies to prepare for a data-driven future.