Kaspersky: 75% of IT Pros Understand Virtualization Security Options

What’s the right security for a virtualized environments? Not all IT security experts know the right answer, according to a new report released this week by Kaspersky Lab.

Endpoint protection solutions provider Kaspersky Lab found the majority of IT professionals understand virtualization security.

Kaspersky’s new “Global IT Security Risks Survey 2014 — Virtualization” revealed three out of every four IT security experts know what virtualization security options are available.

The survey also showed 46 percent of respondents said they believe virtual environments can be adequately protected by conventional security solutions, and 36 percent believe security concerns in virtual infrastructures are significantly lower than in physical environments.

Other survey results included:

“Businesses today face an ever-evolving threat landscape, and cybercriminals are increasingly looking at virtual environments as the next frontier of sophisticated attacks,” Mark Bermingham, Kaspersky Lab North America virtualization evangelist, said in a prepared statement. “With many businesses turning their attention to securing virtual environments, it is critical that they execute these initiatives and understand their options for securing these business-critical environments.”

What do the survey results mean?

Bermingham said the survey results “highlight a clear disconnect between what organizations believe is optimal security for a virtual environment when contrasted with the robust capabilities delivered via agentless and light agent solutions.”

Virtualization is a key contributor to the cloud market’s growth and is likely to continue to drive this market’s expansion as well.

“We believe that IT specialists recognize the threat and are motivated to react appropriately,” Andrey Pozhogin, Kaspersky’s senior product marketing manager, told MSPmentor. “Proper choice of a security solution will enable them to demonstrate more benefits from virtualization projects, thus lowering costs and risks, improving productivity and increasing efficiency, which in its turn will increase virtualization adoption even further.”

451 Research‘s Sept. 2013 report, “Market Monitor Cloud-Enabling Technologies,” showed virtualization accounted for 66 percent of the total market share of cloud-enabling technologies.

Victoria Simons, a research analyst at 451 Research, noted the demand for flexible cloud technologies could lead many large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to invest in virtualization.

“We see the cloud-enabling technologies market growing strongly as large enterprises and SMBs continue along the path of flexible computing,” she said in a prepared statement.

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