While today’s organizations recognize the importance of securing their virtual environment, many IT professionals don’t know that specialized security solutions have been built to deliver both security and efficiency for virtual environments. According to a Kaspersky Lab and B2B International survey of worldwide IT professionals, approximately one out of every four IT security experts have little to no understanding of their virtualization security options. What’s more concerning is that nearly half of respondents (46%) said that virtual environments can be adequately protected by conventional security solutions and 36% believe that security concerns in virtual infrastructures are significantly lower than in physical environments.

While many conventional agent-based security solutions are virtual-aware and provide excellent protection, they consume significant resources and very quickly become counter-productive when scaling virtual environments. Additionally, traditional agent-based security solutions may overwhelm resources when updating or scanning and can create gaps in security when updates need to be applied.

In addition to some of the virtualization security myths unearthed by the survey, Kaspersky Lab also found that IT security professionals may not have a clear understanding about the different virtualization security approaches that are available. The survey found that only one out of every three IT security experts have a clear understanding of light agent and agent-based virtualization solutions, and only one out of every four understands agent-less virtualization security. 

However, even though many organizations may not have a clear understanding of virtualization security options or the consequences associated with using conventional security solutions to protect virtual environments, 64% agreed that security should be one of the first considerations when rolling out virtual infrastructure. In addition, 52% of survey respondents agreed that virtual environments are increasingly forming a core part of their business’ IT infrastructure and nearly one out of every four enterprises said that securing virtualization infrastructure is one of their most important security priorities for the next 12 months.

For more information about the Kaspersky Lab and B2B International virtualization survey, please visit: http://media.kaspersky.com/en/IT_Security_Risks_Survey_2014_Virtualization_report.pdf

To learn more about Kaspersky Security for Virtualization, which brings security technologies to virtual endpoints that were previously difficult to secure without sacrificing network performance, please visit: http://www.kaspersky.com/business-security/virtualization