Virtualization has been seen as a panacea for a slew of ills affecting the enterprise ranging from improving server utilization to helping IT better manage individual workstations.
But virtualization may not be all it’s cracked up to be — at least, in the ways industry researcher Gartner sees it being implemented. A study by the firm found that a lack of security awareness in the tools, processes and personnel involved with deploying virtualized workloads could be a recipe for disaster. eSecurity Planet has the story.
Virtualization has been used as part of a consolidation strategy to put a multitude of underutilized servers on one physical hardware unit. One modern server with lots of memory can house dozens or hundreds of virtual servers, thus saving floor space and electricity for power and cooling.
But as companies make the move, issues often crop up that weren’t anticipated. In its new report, Gartner found 60 percent of virtualized servers deployed between now and 2012 will be less secure than the physical ones they’ve replaced, thanks to bad practices by IT departments or a lack of proper tools to do the job.