Virtualization Security Practical Guide.pdf

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PRACTICAL GUIDE
VIRTUALIZATION SECURITY
Tips to help you protect your systems and sensitive corporate data
Empower business through security
kaspersky.com/business
#securebiz
CONTENTS
Virtualization benefits… for all sizes of business
Meet Max, the intrepid IT & security specialist
Are virtual environments more secure… or less secure?
Using your existing security policies
Agent-based security software
Agentless security software
Small footprint agents
Working out which technology is best for you
Having it all
Security that gives you more options
Kaspersky Security for Virtualization | Agentless
Kaspersky Security for Virtualization | Light Agent
Max’s strategy tips – for secure virtualization
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VIRTUALIZATION BENEFITS…
FOR ALL SIZES OF BUSINESS
MEET MAX, THE INTREPID IT
& SECURITY SPECIALIST
In today’s competitive environment
– with businesses trying to boost
efficiency and cut costs –
virtualization is no longer the
preserve of multinational
enterprises and large-scale
data centers. Virtualization
promises to:
• Run more applications and
services – on fewer servers.
• Cut hardware acquisition costs.
• Reduce operational costs
related to maintenance,
space and energy.
Virtualization is often an important
element in the IT department’s
efforts to meet the business’s
demands to do more and spend
less.
However, whether you’re running
applications on physical or virtual
machines, you still need to guard
against the constant increase in the
volume and sophistication of
malware and other cyberthreats that
could jeopardize your day-to-day
operations by:
• Disrupting your business
processes – and increasing your
operational costs.
• Stealing and exposing your
confidential business information.
• Compromising the security of your
suppliers’ and customers’ data.
• Destroying the competitive
advantage that your business
gains from its intellectual property.
As the IT Manager for a business with 150 employees, Max devotes his
working life to managing every aspect of the company’s IT systems and
services – physical, virtual and mobile. He’s also responsible for keeping
all servers, desktops and mobile devices up and running – plus ensuring
sensitive corporate data is safe and secure.
With so many tasks to juggle – and tight budget constraints to comply
with – Max is always looking for IT solutions that simplify support,
automate everyday tasks and help control costs.
Max’s bosses may not totally understand the day-to-day challenges that
Max faces – they just know everything has to run smoothly. However, with
each passing year, they also realize that the company’s ongoing success is
increasingly reliant on IT… and Max’s ability to introduce new technologies
and IT services that enable improved business processes, while he also
continues to ensure valuable information is protected.
Although the company’s IT infrastructure has
enabled business-critical processes – that
weren’t possible in the past – Max is constantly
being asked to do more with less. Furthermore,
with the growing number of security threats,
plus constant battles to avoid service
disruptions and downtime, Max is buried
in day-to-day routine and he’s got no time
left to perfect his IT strategy.
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A Message From Max
“For our first virtualization projects, I migrated some of our less important
applications to a virtual environment. At that stage, we were keen to delay
migration of mission-critical applications.
“This approach meant we gained invaluable experience and built up our
confidence levels – before moving our most important business processes
and applications to a virtual environment.
“The lessons we learned on those first few projects helped to ensure later
projects went really smoothly.”
ARE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
MORE SECURE… OR LESS SECURE?
It’s a myth that virtualized environments are somehow more secure than
their physical counterparts. Unfortunately, even though there is absolutely
no truth or logic behind this belief, it can lull some organizations into a false
sense of security when they consider security requirements for any
virtualization projects.
From the point of view of everything that interfaces with or interacts with
a virtual machine, the machine ‘looks’ and acts exactly like any physical
machine. Generally, the only thing that is aware that the machine is virtual
is the hypervisor (plus the IT administration team!).
So it’s a simple statement of fact that virtualized environments still have
to contend with all of the potential security risks that physical environments
have to deal with.
FIREWALLS AREN’T ENOUGH
Just because a virtual machine is behind a firewall – within the
organization’s data center – it’s not safe from many different types
of threats that can be launched from outside the company perimeter.
Attackers who have already breached the company’s security perimeter,
will regard unprotected virtual machines as easy targets.
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USING YOUR EXISTING
SECURITY POLICIES
CYBERCRIMINALS FOCUS ON ATTACKING YOUR WEAK LINKS
With cybercriminals always looking to maximize their ill-gotten gains and
minimize the effort necessary to implement their illegal activities, the fact
that some businesses fail to apply adequate security measures to their
virtual environments has not gone unnoticed.
The services and applications
that your IT department delivers
to the business are obviously
important – regardless of whether
those services and applications are
being run on physical or virtual
machines.
If your business has recognized
the need to protect applications
and data running on physical
servers, that same need for
security applies to applications
or business processes that you
run in a virtualized environment.
The majority of the policies that you
applied to those applications and
processes – when they were
running on physical servers or
desktops – are still just as valid.
Your first steps towards a secure
virtualized environment can be as
simple as taking your current
security and operational policies –
that you already apply to your
physical servers and desktops
– and replicating them across your
new virtualized environment.
However, here’s a note of caution
– while replicating security policies
may make perfect sense,
replicating the same security
technologies could:
• Introduce security gaps.
• Greatly increase your IT costs.
• Introduce system inefficiencies.
Your choice of virtual machine
security technologies will need
to be carefully considered.
Traditional agent-based security
software can bring some highly
undesirable side effects.
Criminals recognize that – for many organizations – virtualized
components within the corporate IT infrastructure can be the weak link in
a business’s defenses… and can make it easy for criminals to gain access
to corporate systems and confidential, highly valuable information.
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