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Symantec Analyst Relations

Showing posts tagged with virtualisation
Showing posts in English
Keeping One Step Ahead of the Virtualisation Curve
Neal Watkins | 10 Dec 2012 | 0 comments

 

As head of the Field Technology Sales organisation for Symantec in EMEA, I find myself in some extraordinarily interesting meetings. None more so than a recent half-day workshop with our technology peers at VMware down at Frimley in Camberley.

It was a meeting of minds from a group of extremely passionate individuals — and an ideal opportunity to brainstorm big ideas to resolve some of the challenges that are stopping our customers from virtualising more of their physical infrastructure.  Two of the greatest challenges right now: Regulatory compliance and the cloud, which resulted in two great use cases, which we can solve today.

The first major use cases to emanate from the workshop was the whole issue of security in a virtualised environment. Talk turned to the retail sector. Retailers large and small need to establish a security baseline across their virtual IT environment that protects payment card information, in order to meet the...

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Antivirus and virtual machines - host or instance?
GregDay-SecurityCTO | 10 Dec 2012 | 3 comments

Strip away all the technical jargon and a virtual machine management package is just a software program, which emulates a real computer for each instance of a virtual machine (VM). So, it will have virtual USB ports, virtual network connections, a virtual processor and so on, each of which will use up resources of the real, 'physical' machine.

Each VM instance will need to run an operating system and whichever applications it requires, as will the physical machine. In principle, it stands to reason that the total load on the physical processor at any moment in time is going to add up to the sum of all the OS'es, applications, device drivers, virtual machine management tools and whatever else is running, whether they are on a physical machine or a virtual machine.

With this in mind, a question we are often asked is whether anti-virus software should be installed on the physical machine, or in each virtual machine instance. At first glance you'd think...

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Security in the virtual (desktop) world
GregDay-SecurityCTO | 10 Dec 2012 | 0 comments

While it may not be the answer to everything, desktop virtualization offers a good solution for certain usage models, such as where access needs to be restricted to certain information or services, or where desktop management needs to be centralized. In the model, virtual instances of desktops send display information to remote screens, even though the processing is actually taking place on a server.

The model can put strains on the physical IT architecture, however. To avoid bottlenecks, it helps to have an understanding of what's going on in the underlying server, storage and network environment. As well as visibility on what’s running on each virtual machine, and how much resource it is consuming.

This brings us to desktop antivirus software which, like any other package, is going to be contending for processing cycles. With the best will in the world, if a hundred virtual desktops are running on the same server and accessing the same storage, and each...

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