Virtualization Security is Still Hard to Manage – Survey Shows Nearly Half of IT Staff Fear Unauthorized Access To Virtual Servers

- David Gibson, Vice President of Marketing, Varonis, says:

In recent research conducted by Varonis, we found that data security in virtualized environments is often neglected by IT organizations, with 48% either reporting or suspecting unauthorized access to files on virtualized servers. The study suggests that there is a limited awareness of security matters when it comes to virtualized servers, with 70% of respondents having little or no auditing in place on virtual servers.

According to Gartner, there are more than 50 million installed virtual machines (VMs) on servers.  In line with this, application servers were virtualized by almost all respondents (87%), mainly due to speedier deployment (76%) and disaster recovery (74%).

On the other hand, those who do not virtualize cite disk storage (37%), performance (30%) and a lack of advantages (20%) as the three main reasons for not doing so.

Across different company sizes, one area that appears to be neglected by organizations is file security. While almost 60% said they were very careful about setting permissions and controlling subsequent updates, a revealing 70%, regardless of company size, had implemented little or no auditing – even at the high end of the enterprise space. In fact, 20% of enterprises with more than 5,000 employees admitted to having no file logging capabilities in place.

The lack of sufficient security is further highlighted by 48% either reporting or suspecting unauthorized access to files on their virtualized servers – putting sensitive company information at risk of being misused, lost or stolen. Surprisingly, even for those who do audit all activity, a significant 68% believe there is still unauthorized access.

We suspect that for IT departments, virtualization may be something of a black box. We have found that, after a workload is virtualized, the actual details of managing file permissions and monitoring access is considered to be automatically ‘taken care of.’ It is also quite possible that the teams managing virtualization projects see file security and governance as outside their discipline. The security team may have no visibility of what is happening.

The results suggest that, while virtualization has been groundbreaking in allowing IT to isolate applications and services with a few clicks, it doesn’t solve permissions management and access auditing – in fact it might make it even more complex.

Data protection, obviously, requires the same level of vigilance in a virtual environment – and perhaps even more so given the complexities of managing multiple operating systems on a single computing box. For organizations to stay on top of their digital assets it is vital to further IT education in this area, both in terms of training staff in understanding virtual file systems, as well as in effectively using automation to uncover security holes, monitor activity, and control permissions.

To download the full virtualization research report, visit http://hub.varonis.com/virtualization-report