Server Virtualisation is one of the most rapidly evolving and extensively deployed technologies today. Many IT departments and organisations are benefiting from the cost savings of deploying a virtualised environment and IT administrators are benefiting from the simple deployment and management of these systems. Gartner has stated that “Virtualisation is becoming mainstream: 23% of installed applications are running in a VM now. 48% of installed applications will run on a VM by 2012.” ¹ So, what does this mean in security terms?  Well Gartner has also stated that “60 Percent of Virtualised Servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace through 2012” ²and a recent straw poll carried out by Juniper Networks, of 60 attendees at VMworld 2011, despite security concerns, 63% have already virtualized at least 75% of their data centres and 68% said they are 90% likely to be running mission-critical workloads in virtual machines within the next 12 months ³

As cloud computing and SaaS take mindshare among more and more CIOs, the question arises as to whether core networks will be able to support this distribution of responsibility. The requirements to support compute-intensive applications running over a wide area will include everything from sufficient bandwidth to security, QoS, and SLA guarantees. Read more...