Talk about cutting costs and leveraging your IT infrastructure and virtualization would inevitably sprout up in your line of thinking. Companies are taking to virtualization in a big way but securing your IT network beyond that decision is a concern nonetheless. Solutions, however, are simple and straightforward some of which include keeping on top of your virtual machines and securing them using best practices. Talking about best practices, here are some you don’t really want to overlook:
The first step: knowing and acting
This might sound too obvious and straight out of a IT networking textbook but the first step in securing your virtual network is to locate your virtual machines, take an inventory, and keep track of equipment going out of date. Maintaining spreadsheets with a list of virtual machines is a rather rustic approach to something as crucial as virtualization.
Think about this: during your daily business operations, you could create and use plenty of virtual machines but you could leave them unattended to leading to a increased inventory as compared to your actual needs. To get an accurate inventory, use tools such as Microsoft’s virtualization management tools, VMware’s vSphere’s vCenter management tools and plenty of other tools to help you out.
If there’s change, you have to manage it
Virtualization is all about change. Securing a virtual environment involves heavy duty operations and infrastructure management. Integrating virtual machines into your network would mean taking steps to actually deploy the change, configure new policies, ensure long-term stability and establish security for the entire IT system. It isn’t going to be easy there, is it?
As if that wasn’t enough, you also have to deal with patching virtualization to your existing network infrastructure, bringing in the right products/ platforms that suit your requirements, attend to change management full scale all the while provisioning, updating, commissioning and improvising to meet your new network demands.
Security and management
Security management is often overlooked, but it’s probably the most crucial: security and management of your virtual machines. When you think about taking your machines virtual, you have to think about proper management and administration of various platforms and other technical nuances not to mention the overall security architecture. To start with, you need to assign appropriate roles and principles, policies and guidelines
Who should have access to which platform? How do you determine what part of the network is secured and what isn’t? Who has access to storage and data management? Is there a restricted network access and management protocol in place?
It’s times like these, that we come in at our valuable best! Talk to us if you need to know more about virtualization and about how it can be leveraged for your business.
714-333-9620