When VMware announced the VMsafe APIs more than two years ago, virtualization.info praised the effort and suggested that the advent of the technology was the best thing ever happened to the security industry in a long time. It could have been, assuming a solid strategy behind it, and a proper execution.
But more than two years later, it’s safe to say that VMsafe has gone nowhere so far and that the execution of the strategy has been all but flawless.
This may well depend on the incapability of VMware to approach the security world (their ACE product has been a colossal fiasco that still exists only because it’s being super-slowly integrated into Workstation for free), but the company is not the first one to blame for this failure.
Security vendors in fact did nothing so far to secure virtual infrastructures in a proper, more effective and efficient way.
A large-scale, concrete adoption of hardware virtualization platforms can be tracked back to 2006 so, even accepting that security vendors have been careful in approaching the emerging technology, it’s still true that they had four years to do something. Instead, in 2010, top players like McAfee, Symantec, TrendMicro, and a myriad of smaller others, have yet to address the customers need for security in the virtual data centers.
Worse than that, hardware virtualization is facilitating the advent of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms, where the security challenges are even bigger, and the security vendors above haven’t demonstrated any commitment on these platforms at all.
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