Virtualization security; a growing concern in APAC

SINGAPORE CITY, SINGAPORE: In the wake of rising cost pressures, enterprises in the Asia Pacific are rapidly adopting virtualization in their IT infrastructure setup to address dynamic business requirements or as part of a cloud initiative. Consequently, virtualization security has become indispensable to enterprises, finds Frost & Sullivan.

A new analysis from the research firm also finds that the market earned revenues of $48.4 million in 2011 and estimates this to reach $549.6 million in 2017.

As virtualization spawns new and complex security threats, virtualization security solutions will evolve to protect virtual infrastructure and manage inter virtual machine traffic.

"End users need to be made aware that virtualizing a business environment without implementing adequate security measures may be counterproductive, as it could increase costs and reduce agility," said Frost & Sullivan, industry manager Cathy Huang.

With virtualization, the virtualization layer (hypervisor) becomes a sensitive security target, as its breach could compromise all hosted workloads. Currently, the manageability of virtual infrastructures is a bigger priority than security management among enterprises. Vendors are also pegged back by the lack of compliance support on securing the virtualization infrastructure and the high costs of security products.

However, the growing market mindshare is expected to accelerate the growth of the market. The strong growth momentum in the cloud computing market provides further impetus, as virtualization is a key enabling technology in cloud computing.

The market will also get a leg up from maturing regulations, such as the latest version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), which details the requirements for securing virtual infrastructure.

"To succeed in the market, vendors' virtualization security solutions must be able to optimize resource-intensive tasks," noted Huang. "Vendors that provide consistent policy management across physical and virtual environments will stand out."