SMEs neglect virtualisation security

The majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) making the transition to server virtualisation are not securing their servers adequately, according to Symantec, writes Inspire me.co.uk.

This is significant considering that, based on an Applied Research poll of 658 companies worldwide, 70% of businesses with between five and 249 employees are considering virtualisation.

But just 10% have actually implemented sever virtualisation, and many of those that have done so have not installed a firewall, endpoint protection, or anti-virus software.

“It still feels like the early days of a journey,” said Kevin Rowney, director of breach response at Symantec, in a recent interview, notes CRN.

Server virtualisation kingpin VMware often points to the trend of more organisations virtualising database, CRM, ERP and other mission critical applications.

CEO Paul Maritz recently cited industry analyst predictions that 50% of workloads industry-wide will be running in virtual environments by the end of the year.

But the Symantec-commissioned survey data indicates that this trend hasn't yet materialised in the SME space.

According to the survey data, just 24% of SME respondents have virtualised mission critical applications, while 37% have virtualised productivity applications such as e-mail and calendar.

The survey indicated that the top three obstacles to virtualisation among small businesses are performance (60%), back-up (56%) as well as security and patch management (56%), says eChannel Line.

Interestingly, storage, which is a huge problem in enterprises where the storage costs can easily wipe out the ROI savings, was less of a priority for smaller businesses.