Protecting the dynamic datacenter

Factors such as compliance requirements, virtualization, and cloud computing drive the need for server and application protection that delivers comprehensive security controls while supporting current and future IT environments.

“By far, the #1 concern about cloud services is security. With their businesses' information and critical IT resources outside the firewall, customers worry about their vulnerability to attack”
-Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst, IDC

Virtualization can help your organization achieve significant datacenter operations savings-you can reduce hardware costs and energy demands and achieve greater flexibility in deploying mission critical software applications. Organizations have leveraged consolidation to attain deployment of or more virtual machines (VMs) for each physical server in their IT infrastructure-your business can utilize this technology for similar results.

The greatest challenge your IT personnel might face in virtualization is applying security mechanisms that enable you to fully utilize your virtualization investment. This includes enabling you to host virtual machines with different security levels on the same physical server, providing continuous protection while using mechanisms such as vMotion, protecting virtual machines when dormant or offline, and enabling you to extend your virtualization environment to take advantage of cloud computing. Trend Micro offers solutions to ensure that you can fully and safely utilize your virtualization environment.

Security in the dynamic datacenter

The purpose of IT security is to enable your business, not impede it, but the challenges and complexity you face for your IT security grow every day. Compliance requirements impose security standards for data and applications on servers. Physical servers are replaced with virtual machines to save money, be green, and increase scalability. Cloud computing evolves the traditional IT infrastructure to increase cost savings while enhancing flexibility, capacity, and choice. Servers are no longer barricaded behind perimeter defenses, and like laptops before them, they're now moving outside the security perimeter and need a last line of defense. It's now vital to your defense-in-depth security strategy to deploy a server and application protection system delivering comprehensive security controls while supporting current and future IT environments.

Servers are under pressure

According to the Verizon Business Risk Team's 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report, 59% of recent data breaches were the result of hacking and intrusions. The TJX and Hannaford breaches underlined the potential for system compromises to negatively impact the reputation and operations of any business in significant ways. Organizations continue to struggle to balance the need to protect their resources with the need to extend access to those same resources to more business partners and customers.

Current Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) recognize that traditional perimeter defenses are no longer sufficient to protect data from the latest threats, and that they now require multiple layers of protection beyond appliance-based firewall and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS). Wireless networks, encrypted attacks, mobile resources, and vulnerable Web applications all contribute to the weakness that exposes enterprise servers to penetration and compromise.

Within the past five years, datacenter computing platforms, which largely had been based on physical servers, have undergone a major technology change. The traditional datacenter footprint is shrinking to enable cost savings and "greener" IT through server consolidation. Nearly every organization has virtualized some or all of its datacenter workloads, enabling multitenant uses of what previously had been single-tenant

or single-purpose physical servers. The Gartner Group expects that between now and 2011, the installed base of virtual machines will expand more than tenfold-and it is expected that by 2012, the majority of x86 server workloads will be run within virtual machines.

Servers are multiplying rapidly and in motion

The significant benefits IT virtualization offers organizations have led to widespread adoption. Virtualization increases capacity and responsiveness to corporate demands, and more efficient use of hardware and software licenses results in continued  consolidation of server workloads. In virtual environments, strict separation between network devices and servers diminishes-these are now combined within virtualization

platforms. However, since network security appliances are blind to traffic sent between virtual machines, hosting workloads of different sensitivities opens up the opportunity for attacks. Motion tools-critical for managing planned downtime, effective use of virtualization resources, and application availability-result in additional workload sharing on the server, impacting compliance history management and virtual security

appliances.The inevitable "sprawl" of virtual machines also increases the likelihood of exposure to malicious traffic for those without the latest patches. IT personnel must closely examine the methods used to protect virtual instances of enterprise servers.

Servers open in the Cloud

Cloud computing extends an enterprise's ability to meet the computing demands of its everyday operations. With the growing number of organizations taking advantage of cloud computing, and service providers building public clouds, the security model is further challenged to effectively host these virtualized workloads. Security is the area that causes the greatest hesitation in organizations when it comes to moving business

workloads into public clouds. When IDC recently conducted a survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues to gauge their opinions and understand their companies' use of IT cloud services, security ranked first as the greatest cloud computing challenge. When a server is moved to public cloud resources, the datacenter perimeter offers no protection, as these virtualized servers now provide administrative access directly over the Internet. Problems already faced in the datacenter, such as patch management and compliance reporting, become commensurately more complex as a result. The only relevant protection in the cloud is the lowest common denominator that the vendor can provide on its perimeter-or whatever an organization can equip its virtual machine with to defend itself, since it is hosted on servers alongside other organizations' workloads.

Trend Micro server and application protection addresses the challenging operational security and compliance needs of today's dynamic datacenter. We provide comprehensive protection, greater operational efficiency, superior platform support, and tighter integration with existing investments, and we are more responsive to customer requirements. The Trend Micro Deep Security solution is server and application protection software that unifies security across virtual, cloud computing, and traditional datacenter environments.

For more information please call or visit us at: www.trendmicro.com/thinkagain or call +1-877-21-TREND.

Whitepapers for download:

Cloud Computing Security – A Trend Micro White Paper from August 2009

Meeting the Challenges of Virtualization Security – A Trend Micro White Paper from August 2009