Working with VMware VMsafe application programming interfaces, IBM announced Virtual Server Security for vSphere, and other virtualization product news.

Amazon's cloud computing service should not be used for applications that require advanced security and availability, an analyst report claims.

A version of Catbird's vSecurity Cloud Edition is available as an app in Amazon's EC2-approved catalog of application services.

Microsoft Corp. wants to get its suite of hosted messaging and collaboration products certified to the ISO 27001 international information security standard, part of an effort to try and assure customers about the security of its cloud computing services. It comes amid broad and continuing doubts about the ability of cloud vendors in general to properly secure their services.

The secretive CIA, one of the U.S. government's strongest advocates of cloud computing, believes an internal cloud can make the agency's IT environments more flexible and secure.

Cloud computing makes auditors cringe. It's something we hear consistently from enterprise customers: it was hard enough to make virtualization "palatable" to auditors; cloud is going to be even harder. By breaking the links between hardware and software, virtualization liberates workloads from the physical constraints of a single machine. Cloud takes that a step further making the physical location irrelevant and even obscure.

Amazon and Microsoft have been pushing cloud-computing services as a low-cost way to outsource raw computing power, but the products may introduce new security problems that have yet to be fully explored, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As security controls are virtualized (e.g. firewalls, IPS, web application firewalls and so on), one of the more significant concerns is performance and throughput. II remember a demonstration about a year ago where an IPS running in a VM virtual appliance easily consumed 2 out of 8 cores in a multicore system. A 25% overhead for security controls didn’t make sense. That was then. Hardware advances continue. Within the next year, 64 core systems will be common. Now 2 out of 64 cores is a different story. 3% overhead? That I’ll take.

VMWare's VMsafe program is bringing more security options to the world of server virtualization.

The Cisco Firewall Service Modules (FWSM) has a design limitation based on its ability to discriminate packet forwarding between multiple contexts. It also applies to ASA/PIX software. Lets review this in detail and learn the evil consequences.