Kaspersky Lab’s Number of the Week: Twice as Many Virtual Machines as Physical Servers by 2014

IDC, together with Kaspersky Lab, analysed the global virtualization market[1] to identify the main trends and characteristics related to protecting virtual environments and provided a market forecast until the year 2014. The information suggests that virtualization is currently in use on most new servers, and in two years the number of virtual machines will reach 18 million – that’s twice the number of physical devices. Moreover, it is expected that by 2013 two thirds of all corporate services and applications will work in a virtual environment.

Experts believe such rapid evolution is driven primarily by the advantages of the technology. 75% of the companies that already use virtualization recognize it as truly valuable and are making virtualization a priority in the development of their IT infrastructure.

Kaspersky

According to IDC, despite widespread virtualization, protection for virtual environments is lagging behind. “Virtualization benefits can overshadow security concerns,” commented Timur Faroukshin, IDC Consulting Director in Russia and CIS. “In addition, specialised solutions are new, and many customers aren’t aware that a new approach is available, or what the shortcomings are of their imported legacy security solutions.”

“IDC’s analysis has fully confirmed the conclusions Kaspersky Lab made during its own survey of the European virtualization market,” added Vladimir Udalov, Senior Corporate Product Marketing Manager at Kaspersky Lab. “Although 74% of the companies surveyed have already implemented or are planning to implement server virtualization in the next 12 months, 41% of IT specialists still have basic and just enough knowledge instead of advanced experience to fully understand all the security risks in this area and to choose the right approach to protecting virtual environments. Moreover, 42% of specialists surveyed mistakenly believe that IT security risks are much lower in the virtual environment than in the physical one.”

Kaspersky Security for Virtualization (KSV) is an agentless anti-malware solution that provides a more efficient way to protect your virtualized infrastructure – with greater performance and less impact on virtualization density. The application is easy to deploy and includes advanced management features that simplify a wide range of security tasks – across both physical and virtual computing assets.

The full report can be viewed at the following link: http://www.kaspersky.co.za/beready/content

[1] The IDC Technology  Spotlight, Rethinking Security for Virtual Environments, April 2012