How Delicate is Your Virtual Egg Basket?
An IT industry analyst article published by Virtualization Review.
Server virtualization has taken us to places we’ve never been before, but there is some truth to that old adage about having seen it all before.
Some have said there is nothing new under the sun, that it all comes around in circles. We think server virtualization has taken us to places we’ve never been before, but there is some truth to that old adage about having seen it all before. As has happened in many previous technology adoption cycles, first we struggle with assuring sufficient “correctness” and availability, then we work hard to guarantee performance, and as a third act, we have to eventually harden the solution to both internal and external threats.
With virtualization, this cycle is perhaps more acute in that the whole point is to aggregate many clients and users into one cost-efficient shared resource pool. And the corresponding infrastructure convergence of formerly disparate IT silos concentrates the number of subject matter experts and admins while expanding the end-to-end scope and control of this talented remainder.
Security Is the Third Stage
Security should never be an afterthought, but in our rush to get out ahead of the competition — or even just survive economically to play another day — we stand something up as quick as we can just to see if it can be done. Then as we come to rely on it for day-to-day operations, we discover that it matters when it falls over or performs badly.
Enter big systems management corrections with add-on monitoring, automation, and optimization solutions. But security concerns may still seem a vague threat and an acceptable risk until we start really leveraging the new technology for our mission-critical applications — the most vulnerable “eggs” in our portfolio.
Many organizations have reached that third stage in virtualization whether they know it or not.
…(read the complete as-published article there)