Cybersecurity has become a major topic of discussion for businesses and organizations of all sizes, as the number of security incidents has spiked, capturing headlines worldwide.
It’s been 38 years since the invention of email and today, it is still the number one communication tool in and out of enterprises. While technology, hardware, infrastructure and the internet itself evolved tremendously in the past almost 4 decades, email is the spoiled child of the family that declines to grow up.
Online extortion is on the rise.
Not only have recent months seen an increase in distributed denial-of-service attacks with demands that companies pay up to have their website returned to normal working order, and even the theft of confidential data with threats that it will be released to the public if financial demands are not met, but there has been a noticeable increase in ransomware attacks too.
This is the second post from a series we thought necessary to dedicate to APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) and the new wave of security technologies claiming that they replace or complement antimalware solutions to help organizations defeat this new threat.
In the endpoint security world, specifically antimalware (or antivirus, depending on your definition, but more on that in another post) vendors are offering different features and architectures to address performance in virtualized datacenters. A simple question that organizations have is, “When, where, and why do I need this stuff?” Of course, as a vendor, the tempting answer is, “Always, everywhere, and just because”. However, reality is always more nuanced than the average PowerPoint presentation.
The driver behind server virtualization is clearly cost savings, while agility and flexibility also have value. This well-known return on investment is achievable because servers have fairly predictable workloads, tend to be rather static in their workloads (an Exchange server tends to stay an Exchange server).
Also, the number of servers that can be run on each CPU across a datacenter tends to be low because, generally speaking, they need more horsepower than an end-user system.
Virtualized desktops are quite different. The number of desktops per-CPU across a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is much higher than with servers. The environments tend to be highly dynamic, with instance being instantiated and destroyed at a high rate.
Naturally, trying to lead with cost savings as a primary goal of a VDI deployment is problematic. Instead, agility and flexibility are key.
