Who Is Going to Secure Virtualization? - Twenty-Four Seven Security

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October 02, 2007
Who Is Going to Secure Virtualization?

Came across a blog at Rational Security about the difficulties IT staffers are having filling their ranks with anyone experienced at all with virtualization. And that’s just with virtualization itself, so looking for staffers to secure virtualization is going to be even more difficult.

What follows is a quote from ComputerWorld:

As more organizations adopt server virtualization software, they’re also looking to hire people who have worked with the technology in live applications.

But such workers can be hard to find, as Joel Sweatte, IT manager at East Carolina University’s College of Technology and Computer Science, recently discovered when he placed a help-wanted ad for an IT systems engineer with virtualization skills.

Sweatte received about 40 applications for the job at the Greenville, N.C.-based university, but few of the applicants had any virtualization experience, and he ended up hiring someone who had none. “I’m fishing in an empty ocean,” Sweatte said.

To give his new hire a crash course in virtualization, Sweatte brought him to market leader VMware Inc.’s annual user conference in San Francisco last month. “That’s a major expenditure for a university,” Sweatte said of the conference and travel costs. “[But] I wanted him to take a drink from the fire hose.”

In fact, I recorded a podcast last Thursday with Configuresoft on virtualization security (look for it this Thursday), and I have to say, while researching the topic previous to the podcast, much of the information was totally new to me.

One of the questions I asked Dennis Moreau, the founder and CTO of Configuresoft, was whether he thought virtualization was some sort of end-point in terms of technology. Moreau answered that he though it we were just at the starting point, which means we better have some security types get up to speed on virtualization quick!

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