By Deb Radcliff
For years, Inttra, an e-commerce logistics provider to the world’s largest cargo-shipping organizations, has been using virtualization on its back-end IBM mainframe and Citrix Systems servers in a secure environment. Now the Parsippany, N.J., company primarily uses IBM blade servers running virtual Linux machines. VMware’s virtualization technology on an Intel platform powers this New Data Center infrastructure.
John Debenedette, Inttra’s vice president of IT, says he believed he could keep a virtualized data-center environment secure while emulating established best practices. He’s not ready, however, to risk running virtual Web servers outside his DMZ. Nor is he ready to allow virtual machines on the endpoints, which are harder to control.
“You can follow best practices on all of your virtual machines. But at the end of the day, you’re putting a lot of trust in the
virtual-machine platform layer itself,” Debenedette says.“This layer - also called the hypervisor, the virtual kernel or virtual-machine monitor - sits between the hardware and all its device drivers, including the operating system, which puts it in a very authoritative position.”
Security watchers have not confirmed any exploits at this layer; but virtual-machine-aware malware, such as Red Pill, and virtual-machine rootkits, such as BluePill, are common. Debene-
ROGER HAGAdONE
“You can follow best practices on all of your vurtual machines. But at the end of
the day, you”re putting a lot of trust in the virtual-machine platform layer itself.”
– John Debenedette, vice president of IT, Inttra
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