Virtualized security controls and private clouds are the next big wave for the enterprise, according to research firm Gartner. Whether it’s a physical or virtualized data center or a private cloud, Gartner says security fundamentals don’t change: ensuring confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, access, and auditing is still crucial. But what does a secure network look like in the “cloud”-y world? Gartner provides six attributes that are essential to ensuring tight network security in an era where private clouds become the norm.
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Physical Appliances Replaced by “on-Demand”
When it comes to private clouds, Gartner says traditional silo-ed security deployments on physical appliances won’t cut it. Instead, delivering security solutions through a service model will help security controls to adapt and protect information and workloads where needed.
Exposure of Security APIs
Gartner says RESTful APIs (open representational state transfer) and the availability of code for security services must become available from policy admin and policy decision points so security pros can focus their attention on managing policies instead of programming infrastructure.
Logic Replaces Physical
Moving data to the cloud means workloads and information is not tied to specific devices, fixed IP or MAC addresses anymore, and that means static security policies based physical attributes are useless. Instead, policies based on logic and real-time context must be incorporated, says Gartner.
The “Zone” of Trust
Gartner says instead of administering security policies on a VM-by-VM basis, logic-based security requirements can be used to create “zones of trust” logical workload groups with similar requirements. The benefit? The zones of trust can adapt as VMs move, change and workloads shift.
Separation of IT Ops and Security
To avoid the weakening of security in a virtualized and cloud environmenst, Gartner advises that enterprises look to cloud-computing and virtualization vendors with capabilities to separate security policy formation and the operation of security VMS for other data centre VMs.
Sharing Policies Across Private, Public and Physical Infrastructure
As private clouds become more commonplace, Gartner says sharing policies across the data center security infrastructure, both physical, public and virtualized is ideal. But, as of today, no standards exist for that, but VMware and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) are starting to solve that issue.
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