Think Thin
The recent surge of interest in virtualization has meant big business for vendors like Sun, IBM and Novell, as well as a host of smaller vendors, who sell virtualization software and services. Much of the business these companies have seen so far has been in the data center as part of server consolidation projects. But experts expect that to change in the coming months and years as more organizations tire of losing laptops and having careless users foul up their machines beyond all recognition with spyware and viruses.

Sun and IBM in particular have well-developed architectures designed to enable customers to use thin clients on the desktop and large pools of virtualized server resources on the back end.

Such architectures are seen by experts and customers as net positives for security for a number of reasons, mainly because thin clients hold no data. Instead, the client machines are essentially little more than terminals that enable users to acces...

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"There are important security reasons for deploying thin clients. The biggest one probably is the close control of data on the endpoints," says Patricia Bolton, CTO of IBM Global Services' End User Services Group.

"There is no data on the endpoints in this configuration, which is key because a lot of businesses now are concerned about the proliferation of sensitive data within their organizations," she says. "Every time you hear about a laptop being stolen, that's the big concern."

Bolton points out that many organizations in recent years have eliminated all of the labor costs they can in IT, and that now the cost savings must come from other places.

"Supporting end users is a huge cost," she says. "The idea of replacing laptops just for mobility's sake is not appealing."

At this point, however, servers are the main focus of most enterprise virtualization efforts; EMA's numbers show that only 5 percent of enterprises have a desktop virtualization deployment.

The benefits of server virtualization are myriad, but the main attraction for most companies is the ability to use one physical server to host multiple instances of an operating system or several different operating systems. In this type of deployment, an application such as VMware ESX Server acts as the host OS on the server; administrators can then load several other operating systems on the same physical server. Each OS has its own dedicated set of hardware resources, including RAM, NICs, a CPU and a hypervisor.

This configuration gives administrators the ability to reduce the number of physical servers they deploy, while also keeping each instance isolated from all of the others on the same machine. That basic design is meant to increase security by preventing data from leaking between virtual machines or malware from jumping from one VM to another. A second type of server virtualization involves using an OS such as Solaris or Linux to act as the management layer and host other instances of the same OS.

"There is such a euphoria around this, and security is not at the forefront of people's minds," says Graham Lovelle, senior director of x64 systems at Sun. "Money savings are driving the interest in virtualization. But risks do exist. It all starts with the robustness of the virtualization layer. VMware has proven to be enterprise-ready, but as you get any volume of software that goes up, people will write exploits against it. And those are potentially more insidious because they attack the layer that holds multiple operating systems. I do expect more attacks."

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