A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a customer whose business was expanding fast, so he had to add three new servers to his server farm. To save precious floor space, he decided to virtualize a couple of these servers. The results were so encouraging that he virtualized the rest of the servers that had a low utilization rate. Again, everything went fine, and he saved enough floor space so that there would still be room for a dozen additional servers.
What was odd, though, the customer did not receive as many network security threats, firewall, or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) alerts as he used to. It was as if a large chunk of network traffic had just disappeared. After checking all of the firewall, IPS and network monitoring logs and finding them in normal condition, he realized that his new virtual environment was a blind spot for traditional network security threat detectors – they could not see what happened there.
This customer is representative of the growing trend in the data center today. Virtualization makes it possible to deploy multiple virtual servers each running separate operating systems and applications on one physical server. The results are more efficient usage of existing hardware, reduced power and cooling costs and reduction in data center footprints…and a complex one-stop shop for hackers trying to access valuable data. This is definitely not an ideal location for a “blind spot” on the network. The security threats posed to the customer’s network made him quickly realize that this wouldn’t be nearly as plain and simple as he expected.
