information technology is expected to play an important part in the global economic recovery, according to a new survey released Wednesday.
Some 72 percent of business and information technology executives say their "organizations place greater value on the IT function today than they did before the economic crisis" and that they "view IT as an important part of their economic recovery efforts," according to Accenture's Global Survey on IT Investments.
This is not an unfamiliar sentiment and is one we've heard from United States CIO Vivek Kundra as he's attempted to use IT to kick start a variety of programs on the federal level that will set the pace for innovative new uses of technology across the globe.
The results of the Accenture survey are similar to last week's Goldman Sachs cautiously optimistic survey results that suggested IT spending would trend upward in 2010 and normalize to pre-recession levels with the majority of countries represented planning to increase investment selectively next year.
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The cost benefits of virtualization are well-documented, allowing enterprises to significantly reduce the space and electrical power required to run data centers and streamline the management of an ever-growing number of servers.
Virtualization also provides means for expedient scalability. Given today's economic climate and cost-cutting mandates, it is not surprising that analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that 50 percent of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012.
What many organizations fail to understand, according to Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO of virtualization security provider Altor Networks, is that collapsing multiple servers into a single one with several virtual machines inside eliminates all firewall, intrusion detection, and other protections in existence. Physical security measures literally become "blind" to traffic between VMs, since they are no longer in the data path.
This echoes comments made by Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, who wrote in a recent presentation titled "Securing the Next-Generation Virtual Data Center" (subscription required), that "most virtual machines you deploy will be less secure than the physical systems they replace," and that "virtualization will radically change how you secure and manage computing environments."
VMware recently launched a partner program to help ISVs develop solutions certified as "VMsafe." VMsafe provides API sharing through a secure container, enabling partner companies to access virtual environments. This virtual security technology provides fine-grained visibility over virtual-machine resources, including monitoring every aspect of the system with the ability to address previously undetectable viruses, rootkits, and malware before they can infect a system.
I spoke to Ben-Efraim to better understand the issues around VM security and for what users should be on the lookout. According to him, there are two common approaches that use existing methods to secure virtual-network traffic: using VLANs to separate and control communication between VMs; and taking software-based firewalls and running them as agents on each VM. Unfortunately, both of these approaches fall short.
VLAN segmentation extends the notion of LAN resource segmentation to include VMs. The approach essentially requires that VMs, which can naturally be grouped (i.e. by function or user base), be isolated from other VMs by use of virtual switches and routing (i.e. the human resources VLAN contains HR-serving VMs). However, VLAN segmentation is not a permanent solution to securing environments because of networking complexities, performance degradation, and security limitations of the approach, Ben-Efraim said.
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VMware's announcement Monday of its new VCloud initiative is an early attempt to offer a more "enterprise-class" cloud offering. Considering that most cloud offerings are based on virtual machine images, it's a smart (and obvious) move by VMware to stake its claim.
To date, the majority of cloud offerings have lacked certain enterprise fundamentals--things like security models, licensing agreements, and so on that are requirements, not accessories. By aligning with hosting providers like Rackspace, VMware starts to offer show some of the enterprise type of attributes we'll eventually see from companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
But why has VMware taken so long to embrace the cloud? And what will happen to all of the providers who are VMware customers who now find themselves competing directly with the source?
Things should start to get interesting for Xen and XVM. I only have cursory knowledge of Red Hat's Qumranet acquisition, but there is a clear opportunity for basically everyone who is not VMware to go after the providers that are currently locked in.
Oh, and don't forget Microsoft, which has a massive network of value-added resellers and hosting providers locked in to Windows and who will undoubtedly adopt Hyper-V.
Overall this move is beneficial for the whole virtualization market, but it's hard to see how VMware can maintain its dominant position if cloud providers see them as a threat instead of a partner or technology supplier.
As Tom Krazit reports on the One More Thing blog Google is getting ready to unveil its Android phone software.
Google acquired Android in August of 2005 (most reports say it cost far less than $100m) and now two years later seems to have created what will become the dominant force in the handset operating system arena. Why? Because it's an open platform, which is exactly what consumers want and the carriers hate. Plus now that it's Google, the carriers will have no choice to all get in line once one of them (it looks like VZW first) jumps on the bandwagon.
The capper is that sources say Google will open-source the Android code. How else do you get people using it and innovating? Maybe VMware should take notes.
So what's the impact on the other dominant mobile operating systems?- Windows Mobile--I like that Android will probably be taken as another personal affront to the MS monopoly. Plus, Windows Mobile has *never* been good.
- PalmOS--probably toast. The only way they can survive is to adopt Android...and considering how poorly the company and it's products have been doing, I wouldn't expect much regardless
- Symbian--probably the biggest disruption will relate to Symbian as they have the largest footprint and have an "open operating system"
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