• Network World, Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:37 PM

A full 60% of virtual servers are less secure than the physical servers they replace, according to new research from Gartner. That's a potentially troubling finding for Google and Microsoft, both of which are betting their futures on virtual, a.k.a., "cloud" computing. On the bright side, Gartner predicts that by 2015, only 30% of "virtualized" servers will be less secure than the physical machines they're expected replaced.

According to Gartner, virtualization itself is not inherently insecure, but "many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the information security team in the initial architecture and planning stages." At present, 18% of enterprise data center workloads that could be virtualized have been converted to virtual servers. By the end of 2012, however, more than half of eligible workloads will have been virtualized, according to Gartner.

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