Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Nathan Wenzler, Executive Director of Security, Thycotic
Predictions for the Secured, Virtualized World in 2016
As the end of 2015 approaches, we gear up for the holiday season and hopefully wind down the lingering projects on our lists. It’s an ideal time to reflect on the lessons learned of the past year and look forward to what 2016 will bring for the virtualization and security communities.
While there are some who believe the two disciplines have very little in common, the needs and challenges in both IT security and virtualization are increasingly aligning. Because of this, it’s becoming more typical for organizations to bring their respective teams together to ensure that as their environments become more and more virtualized, spread out and scaling across the globe, they are doing so in a secure manner which protects user information, business critical data and company assets from theft, attack or misuse. With that said, here are four predictions for what we’ll see in the upcoming year regarding security within virtualized environments:
#1: There will be increased scrutiny from the broader IT and security communities
This may seem like a fairly obvious prediction, as more and more organizations are running huge amounts of their backend servers and critical applications on virtualized platforms. the numbers continue to grow, more attention will be paid by the administrators and security personnel charged with maintaining these systems. But they’re not the only ones who will be paying attention in the coming year. Auditors, regulators, application developers, hosting providers and even customers will begin to scrutinize not only the systems running on virtualized platforms, but the platforms themselves. A recent survey at VMWorld Europe revealed that almost 70 percent of organizations have half or more of their environment virtualized.
With so many critical systems being managed by these hypervisors, the attention that’s been paid to servers and applications in the past by auditors, regulators, etc. will now also be directed toward the virtualization platforms themselves to ensure that they are secured, meet regulatory compliance, adhere to technology standards and are reliable enough to keep customer and user functionality up and running without interruption. This additional attention paid to these platforms means…
#2: Virtualization software companies will improve and increase the security tools built into to their products
Also from the survey conducted at VMworld Europe, over 60 percent of respondents felt that companies like VMware do not have sufficient security tools built into their software to properly secure virtualized systems. Companies like Microsoft and VMware are well aware of the ever-present risk of attacks by cyber criminals that can cause outages or data breaches. As more of their customers rely on virtualization platforms to run their businesses, they will have to build in better tools to allow admins to increase the security posture of their environments more easily from the platforms themselves. This is critical, as many security products struggle to keep up with the speed and scale in which virtualization platforms can deploy new servers and applications anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, hackers also know this, which leads us to…
#3: The easy scalability of virtualized environments leads to more attacks against the virtual platforms themselves
Again, this isn’t a truly new concept, but the focus of the attacks may be a bit more of a surprise. Like any other target of opportunity in the technology world, hackers are going to focus on targets that gain them the most return for the least amount of effort. For years, Microsoft Windows was the primary target, since it ran over 95 percent of the world’s PCs and servers. During that time, many thought that Macs were immune to attack and totally secure because there were no widely known attacks that took place against them. Today, Apple has a little over 13 percent market share in the PC world, and as that number has grown, so too have the number of attacks against Apple’s operating systems.
So, as more companies put more and more of their systems on the virtualization platforms, products like VMware ESXi, vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V are going to become more common targets for hackers. If the hypervisors themselves can be compromised, an attacker gets that much closer to accessing the systems which are hosted on the platform. And since these platforms are so good at scaling out hundreds and thousands of systems in a very small amount of time, the potential targets provided to an attacker grows at a scale that no IT or security team is going to be able to handle on their own. This is why…
#4: Use of automated and integrated security tools will skyrocket
Gone are the days where a single system administrator would enter a new user account into Active Directory by hand and assign them their login information. Today’s infrastructures grow and change too rapidly for these manual processes. Automation is the key that all admins rely on to get their day-to-day work done. And this principle will also carry over more and more into security tools.
Consider an admin who spins up 1,000 new servers in their virtualized environment. Every one of those servers has a local administrator account which has full access to the system. That also means there’s 1,000 new accounts for a hacker to target and try to compromise so that they can own the system and possibly more. It would be nearly impossible for the admin to change the passwords on every system to something unique, but with automation tools like scripts and APIs, it becomes trivial. If you can add this automation to security tools like a privileged credential management system, you can take full advantage of the functions the security software provides (like changing the passwords automatically every 30 days or auditing admin access to these non-human accounts) as fast as the virtualization platform can deploy the systems. The needs of the virtualization community will force security vendors who aren’t doing this already to build out much better integration for automation tools and technologies as a native part of their toolsets.
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About the Author
Nathan Wenzler – Executive Director of Security, Thycotic
Nathan has almost two decades of experience designing, implementing and managing both technical and non-technical solutions for IT and Information Security organizations. Throughout his career, Nathan has helped government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies build new information security programs from scratch, as well as improve and broaden existing programs with a focus on process, workflow, risk management, and the personnel side of a successful security effort. Currently as the Executive Director of Security for Thycotic, Nathan brings his expertise on security program development and implementation in both the public and private sector to admins, auditors, managers, and security professionals at a variety of conferences, trade shows, and educational events.
