Fear Of A Hyperjacked Planet

Asked to do more with less, CIOs are using virtualization to pack more services into fewer physical boxes, reduce energy consumption, and provide greater flexibility. But security and risk professionals worry that in the headlong rush to embrace virtualization, their companies may have failed to secure their new virtual infrastructures. Chief among these concerns include hyperjacking and the risks of deploying virtual machines (VMs) in the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Forrester feels hyperjacking fears are overblown. The real risks are operational. Virtual infrastructures can be kept secure by: 1) segregating administrative, hypervisor, and live-migration traffic away from production traffic; 2) keeping VMs with different security classifications on separate physical hosts; and 3) enforcing zone boundaries with separate hardware.