LONDON, August 22 /PRNewswire/ --

- Misconfiguration Named Number One Security Risk to Virtual
Environments

Tripwire, a leader in configuration assessment and change
auditing for virtual environments, (http://www.tripwire.com/europe) surveyed
enterprise IT professionals to assess how vigorously virtualisation is
expanding within production server environments and to measure how security,
change controls and compliance requirements are keeping pace.

More than 90 percent of those interviewed said that
virtualised servers are now deployed in their production environments. In
fact, three of four respondents reported that up to half of all their
production servers are now virtualised.

While more than 80 percent of respondents said their change
management and compliance controls are no different between physical and
virtual infrastructure, and 26 percent felt security controls for virtualised
servers are actually more stringent, responses indicate that a "tug of war"
may be underway over who is accountable for security and controls for virtual
servers. Just half of those surveyed felt that ensuring security, change
control, and compliance for virtual servers is the responsibility of system
administrators and their management. On the other hand, 37 percent of those
associated with the Security group claim responsibility for security
controls.

Moreover, a serious issue waits for some organisations
deploying virtual servers in production environments. The majority of
respondents agree that security risks for virtual servers are the result of
misconfiguration, not inherent weaknesses of virtualisation technology.

"If an increasingly overworked IT staff is more likely to make
mistakes, and configuration errors are the cause of security exposures in
virtual servers, then IT management must consider how they can mitigate this
risk," said Mark Gaydos, Tripwire VP of Marketing. "As more of the production
workload becomes virtualised and those managing virtual servers continue to
be overwhelmed, it is apparent that automated configuration control must play
a larger role to ensure appropriate server configuration and adequate
security."

A majority (69 percent) of respondents agreed that dedicated
configuration tools are needed to ensure proper configuration of virtualised
servers, with two-thirds of these respondents noting they are in the process
of evaluating or planning to acquire such tools over the next 12 months.

The Tripwire survey report, "Is Virtualisation Under Control:
Current Opinions on Security and Controls for Virtual Servers in production
Environments", can be downloaded for free at
http://www.tripwire.com/solutions/virtualization.cfm.

For further information, please call +44-20-7464-4210

    or contact:

    Richard Botley, T: +44(0)1932-578800, email address: Richardb@itpr.co.uk