Analyst Insight Series: Virtualization Virtue #2: Stronger Cloud Security and Fault Tolerance

Related Articles Analyst Insight Series: Virtualization Virtue #2: Stronger Cloud Security and Fault Tolerance First VMmark Result Published Using VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 57: Behind the Code – A Journey from Customer Pain to VCF 9.0 Guest post by Jean Atelsek, S&P Global Market Intelligence This blog is the second in our series on the benefits and trends of virtualization ( read the first blog here , and a companion to the 451 Research Business Impact Brief “ The virtues of virtualization. ” Securing infrastructure, applications and data has always been a tall order for IT, and it grows taller in modern distributed environments: attack vectors multiply as endpoints are added, and access and identity management becomes more complex. The inherent security enabled by virtualization is a key factor behind the staying power of virtual machines in today’s IT estates. VM isolation, network micro-segmentation and live migration allow operations teams to protect the environment and secure data while maintaining high availability. The scale and sophistication of cyberattacks has surged with growing internet connectivity and AI-driven automation: NIST’s National Vulnerability Database shows that in 2024, a record-breaking 40,009 new common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) were discovered, up 38% from the prior year. 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Information Security, Budgets & Outlook 2024 survey reveals the impact on security teams, with cloud security, AI/ML implementation, GenAI, and data privacy cited as the top pain points. Not long ago, securing applications was seen as an afterthought, with controls applied after development and before deployment into production, but in today’s dynamic environments this is no longer sufficient. The key is to “shift left” and apply controls by default without losing up-to-the-minute availability of resources for developers. Virtualization accomplishes this by creating an isolated environment for each virtual machine, thereby reducing the attack surface, ideally with out-of-the-box configurations for protecting data, implementing hardening and security best practices, authenticating users (including non-human identities such as AI agents), and rotating certificates automatically. To ensure high availability, VMs benefit from redundancy—periodically saving snapshots in a remote location so configurations can be restored in case of an outage—and the ability to do live migration between physical hosts. Because virtualization defines machine characteristics in software, failover can be “designed in” to the environment to automatically recover without impacting the user experience. This advantage applies not only during emergencies but also when upgrading underlying hardware.