Internet Research Group (IRG) today announced the release of its latest report on the changing landscape of security and virtualization "VMsafe, Virtualization and Security."

At the end of last month at its European User Conference in Cannes, France, VMware announced its new security initiative to protect applications running in virtual machines called VMware VMsafe including endorsements from twenty security industry vendors. The Internet Research Group used the occasion of this launch to prepare the "VMsafe, Virtualization and Security" report as an in-depth look at the VMsafe approach to securing the virtualized data center, its ability to assist customers with securing valuable infrastructure and the potential incorporation of VMsafe by third party security vendors.

"Security is a critical aspect of data center operations whether or not the center is virtualized," noted Peter Christy, co-founder of IRG. "An in-depth examination of virtualization shows that virtualization has a big impact on security (pro and con) and yet the existing virtualization customers seem remarkably unconcerned -- fewer than 5% have added some virtualization-specific security offering. The $64,000 question is whether this market inattention to security will turn out to be the Achilles' Heel of virtualization."

This report addresses the following questions:

1.  What is VMsafe and why does it matter?
2.  What are the security issues unique to virtualized server environments?
3.  What are the issues with VMsafe?
4.  What security issues remain?
5.  When will security solutions incorporating VMsafe become available?

The twenty vendors which endorsed VMsafe at the VMware announcement are: Altor Networks, Apani, Blue Lane, Catbird, Cenzic, Check Point, F5, Fortinet, IBM, Imperva, McAfee, Reflex Security, RSA, Secure Computing, Shavlik, Sophos, Symantec, Trend Micro, Tripwire and WebRoot. Other large technology companies involved with server virtualization include Cisco, Citrix and Microsoft.

The study is available now. A table of contents for this study can be found at www.irg-intl.com.