Virtualization provides organizations with many costs savings and significant business agility. Among the most effi cient datacenter operators are service providers, such as Cloud Service Providers (also known as infrastructure-as-a-service) and application-as-a-service providers.
Within traditional businesses, virtualization is powering a shift toward IT as a service. As an organization increases the level of virtualization and takes steps toward creating an internal (private) cloud, operating margins become a primary
focus of IT departments. Similarly, cost and operational effi ciency represent the primary driver for leveraging external
(public) clouds.
Many organizations use the Xen hypervisor, while service providers often use Linux operating systems as they provide attractive cost models and operational fl exibility. These organizations excel at increasing operational effi ciency through innovative use of virtualization since datacenters are not part of the business, but rather, datacenters are the business.
When creating a highly virtualized datacenter, organizations normally consider the impact on hardware, networking, storage, back-up, and so on. However, they must also consider the impact of endpoint security on the success of their cloud infrastructure projects.
This solution brief describes the often unanticipated impact of endpoint security on operating margins, which must be considered as organizations push virtualization usage toward cloud.
Virtualization security challenges
It is a well-known fact that antivirus software is quite simply a requirement today. Applications and operating systems running in physical, virtual or cloud-based environments are all susceptible to exploitation. Although traditional security
can be used in virtualized environments, it is neither built nor optimized for this type of infrastructures.
Using traditional antivirus solutions can result in specifi c challenges in a cloud environment such as:
● Low virtual machine consolidation ratios
● Boot latency
● AV storms
● Outdated AV on dormant virtual machines
● Administrative bottlenecks
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