A recently released study of 100 IT professionals and those in charge of virtual server security decision making showed that while companies are moving toward virtualization and cloud provisioning options, they are beginning to face a number of significant challenges.
The survey was conducted by Network World on behalf of security providers McAfee and Brocade, and was aimed at companies in North America that have more than 500 employees. What the study found was not surprising, as it calls for more development in the areas of cloud security and access due to problems like loopholes, inconsistent policies, and traffic bottlenecks.
Over 60 percent of respondents to the survey are currently engaged or planning to upgrade their data centers, and in many cases this is because of the increased use of virtualization. Of those who responded, almost 30 percent indicated that their scaling itself was a concern, and over 30 percent have concerns about both bandwidth and traffic issues.
What the data appears to indicate is that companies involved in full-scale virtualization are beginning to see security and storage challenges, among other issues, as the pressing concerns in the next generation of business computing. 77 percent stated that threat protection is the largest concern, while others viewed targeted attacks (26 percent) or security breaches (24 percent) as their biggest potential problems.
Now, Brocade has developed their Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switches which, in combination with McAfee’s tailored solutions, can create a true Ethernet fabric with Layer 2 networks, but without the need for Spanning Tree Protocol.
Both McAfee and Brocade are looking to develop leading-edge customer solutions that address not only the current challenges virtualization presents, but the new issues that cloud computing and further technologies will bring to bear.
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