Management and Security Challenges with Virtualization
Virtual environments require proper management and governance to get the actual benefits of saving costs and increasing efficiency. Securing the virtual environment is one of the major concerns. Although virtualizations help achieve scalability, reduced cost of operation, increased functionality, and improved efficiency, it comes with the following security and management challenges:
● The sharp drop in server and memory performance due to the creation of way too many virtual images.
● Security vulnerabilities due to lack of control over the virtual image life cycle.
● Increased storage cost reduces profits due to excess virtual image creation.
● Security risk due to malicious and uninformed management of virtual images.
● Compromising compliance requirements due to inaccurate monitoring of virtual infrastructure data logs.
● Abandoning the virtual machines created for a specific task after the purpose is served/ not actively managing and updating the virtual machines leads to leakage of sensitive data stored in them.
● Due to improper security checks, virtual machines are prone to viruses, malware, and ransomware attacks from infected virtual images. This can affect the entire virtual infrastructure if the infrastructure lacks isolation and security controls.
● Hackers gain access to the entire infrastructure if poor configuration choices are made, like allowing sharing of files between virtual machines / leaving firewall ports open, etc.
● A lot of damage can be done to the infrastructure without proper security management if a hacker gains access through a compromised user account or manually accesses the host servers.
● Lack of update makes a offline backed up the virtual machine a security risk as such virtual machines remain with the configuration and security updates from when they were last online.
● Without proper security measures, the hypervisor or the virtual machine monitor may fail the entire infrastructure.
Data and Storage Virtualisation
You can use data virtualization to create a dynamically linked data services platform that allows data to be easily searched and connected through a unified reference source. As a result, data virtualization provides an abstract service that delivers data in a consistent form regardless of the underlying physical database. In addition, data virtualization exposes cached data to all applications to improve performance.
Storage virtualization combines physical storage resources so that they are more effectively shared. This reduces storage costs and makes managing the data stores required for extensive data analysis easier. Data and storage virtualization plays a significant role in making it easier and less costly to store, retrieve, and analyze the large volumes of fast and varying data types. Remember that some big data may be unstructured and not easily stored using traditional methods. Storage virtualization makes it easier to store large and unstructured data types. It is advantageous to access various operational data stores on demand in a big data environment. For example, you may only need access to a columnar database infrequently. With Virtualization, the database can be stored as a virtual image and invoked whenever needed without consuming valuable data center resources or capacity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What impact does virtualization have on security?
Virtualization improves physical security by reducing the number of hardware in an environment. Reduced hardware in a virtualized environment implies fewer data centers. Server virtualization allows servers to return to revert to their default state in case of an intrusion.
What are virtualization security challenges?
Top virtualization security challenges are external attacks, keeping snapshots on VMs, sharing files between VM and host, and remote console.
What is security virtualization?
Security virtualization refers to the use of security solutions that are software-based and designed to work within a virtualized IT environment.
Conclusion
In this article, we have extensively discussed Virtualization and How It Supports Distributed Computing, Management and security challenges with virtualization. Having gone through this article, I am sure you must be excited to read similar blogs. Coding Ninjas has got you covered. Here are some similar blogs to redirect: Big Data Engineer salary, Virtualisation, Virtual Machine Security, Virtualisation in Cloud Computing and Implementation of Big data virtualisation. We hope that this blog has helped you enhance your knowledge, and if you wish to learn more, check out our Coding Ninjas Blog site and visit our Library. Do upvote our blog to help other ninjas grow.
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