Complexity, key management, and lack of comprehensive offerings from vendors are a few of the challenges faced by users looking to encrypt their virtual data.
The heart of the problem is that multiple virtual machines often appear as a single entity to the storage fabric, making it difficult to encrypt individual applications.
"With virtualization, it's hard to encrypt on a user-by-user and an application-by-application basis," warns Eric Ogren, analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "In a virtual server, you could be running multiple operating systems and applications using the same storage."
"Today, from a Fibre Channel perspective, all the different virtual machines look like one server," says Dore Rosenblum, vice president of marketing at encryption specialist NeoScale.
Users acknowledge the potential problem as they crank up their virtualization strategies. "From what I know about encryption, I would say that it would be a valid concern," says Sasan Hamidi, CSO of Miami, Fla., travel firm Interval International. Hamidi's group is in the early stages of rolling out VMware's ESX Server, although they have yet to encrypt any virtual data.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
