The next wave of IT security innovation will be driven by
virtualisation technology,
VMWare's security strategist Nand Mulchandani has
predicted.
In the next three to five years, security suppliers will achieve
higher levels of security using virtualisation than is possible in
the physical world, according to Mulchandi.
"We will potentially see a whole new range of security products
that look vastly different to what we have today," he said.
Technologies in the virtual datacentre such as distributed
resource scheduling, for example, could be used to launch security
system scans on personal computers when not in use. They could also
enable application firewalling on demand.
"Machines could be security-scanned and patched offline to avoid
any disruption to work and the next time the user logs in a fresh
system will be loaded that has been fully updated," Mulchandi
said.
He added that security suppliers had reached the limit of
talking about the speed of signature updates and were now looking
to virtualisation as a way forward.
"The more security suppliers become aware of what is possible
through virtualisation, the more interesting things are going to
get," he said.
Benefits of virtualisation >>
Stuart
King's risk management blog >>