Virtualization’s Benefit is…Security? Really?

Some industry observers view virtualization as a factor that lessens security. But not a new start-up launched by some savvy insiders. Paul Rubens details the new idea.

Forget about server consolidation, increased utilization, lower hardware costs and all those other benefits of server virtualization regularly trotted out by vendors. The real benefit of sticking your workloads on top of a hypervisor is … security.

That will come as news to anyone struggling to get his or her head around virtual firewalls and the like, but it’s the uncompromising line being taken by Simon Crosby, who until a few weeks ago was CTO of the data center and cloud division of Citrix. He and Ian Pratt, another hypervisor guru who was previously chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource, have just started a company called Bromium, whose stated aim is to build a second-generation virtualization product with the goal of making computing more trustworthy.

“If we can manage to pull this stunt off, it’s going to be big in the sense that virtualization’s primary benefit will turn out to be security,” Crosby said recently, “It will be bigger than all the other benefits.”

Read the rest about virtualization and security at ServerWatch.