As head of the Field Technology Sales organisation for Symantec in EMEA, I find myself in some extraordinarily interesting meetings. None more so than a recent half-day workshop with our technology peers at VMware down at Frimley in Camberley.

It was a meeting of minds from a group of extremely passionate individuals — and an ideal opportunity to brainstorm big ideas to resolve some of the challenges that are stopping our customers from virtualising more of their physical infrastructure. Two of the greatest challenges right now: Regulatory compliance and the cloud, which resulted in two great use cases, which we can solve today.

The first major use cases to emanate from the workshop was the whole issue of security in a virtualised environment. Talk turned to the retail sector. Retailers large and small need to establish a security baseline across their virtual IT environment that protects payment card information, in order to meet the requirements of the PCI DSS standard.

The requirement is challenging since the retail outlets are highly distributed across geographic areas and typically have light weight IT outposts to support them, so it’s not as easy as you might think. Retailers have complex environments between centralised and distributed IT operations with IT assets in a variety of places and those assets needing to comply to security standards.

As retailers transform to a virtual infrastructure they need to be protected from top to bottom using a three layer approach—including the guest, the hypervisor and management server.

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Read the entire post at its source on Symantec Connect - Keeping One Step Ahead of the Virtualisation Curve