Kaspersky Security for Virtualization: more visibility, less headache

Virtualization is most often associated with a higher enterprise level – i.e big companies, a lot of machines, both physical and virtual, and a lot of fuss if anything goes wrong. This association is at least partially true. With bigger infrastructures it’s most likely that if real problems occur, they are large-scale. Additionally, it can be a chore of its own handling and keeping an enterprise-level virtual infrastructure in a healthy state. 

It’s a chore to keep an enterprise-level virtual infrastructure in a healthy state.

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As we have said before, a virtual infrastructure requires the same level of protection from data losses as a physical one, because virtual machines are used to working with real data, and any loss to a malware attack can come at a dear cost. But ‘the same level’ doesn’t actually need to (or, rather, must NOT) mean that the same solutions that are used for the protection of individual physical PCs should also be used for VMs. Why? This topic was extensively covered in our previous post on this matter, but to keep it simple, using traditional ‘agent-based’ security in virtual environments can put a heavy strain on the servers and cause serious drops in performance for the entire system, which nobody wants.

Kaspersky Security for Virtualization is used to ensure the centralized protection of the virtual machines’ host and to provide security for individual machines as well, but without the unnecessary draining of resources.

However, there is more to it. As said before, keeping control over loads of virtual machines can be quite the difficult task. An enterprise environment is pretty large and is also likely to be diverse and dynamic. VMs are grouped by their purpose, activated on demand and deactivated when they are not needed anymore. Keeping this ‘vibrant’ medium in a healthy state would require a lot of fine-tuning, a lot of effort and a lot of time. And time is an asset too luxurious to waste if it is possible not to.

Aside from centralized protection and a reduced load on system resources, Kaspersky Security for Virtualization offers a number of advantages from the system administrator’s point of view.

First of all, it is a quick and easy deployment that doesn’t require any reboot for both physical and virtual machines (with Light Agent, though there are some exclusions: if there is already some security solution installed on a VM it has to be rebooted).

There is also no need to set host servers into maintenance mode in order to deploy our solution. In other words, there are no unnecessary downtimes and interruptions.

There is no need to reboot in order to deploy Kaspersky Security for Virtualization

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Both agentless and Light Agent versions of Kaspersky Security for Virtualization allow different security settings for different groups of virtual machines (whatever groups are there), which is a time-saving feature that allows you to not have to use the same protection feature for all VMs or set up security for every single one. Amongst other things, this helps to preserve the performance of the systems, allowing you to exclude any scanning functions not relevant to a specific application or the current role of the machines.

And there is one additional good thing! While Kaspersky Security for Virtualization is well integrated within the platforms, it is also set to protect VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix Xen, and it shares the same codebase with other security applications made by Kaspersky Lab.

What does it mean in practice? A lot. All of the security solutions made by Kaspersky Lab have the same management console – Kaspersky Security Center. This console lets you configure and control solutions for both virtual and physical environments. In other words, if you have both Kaspersky Security for Virtualization (any version) and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, you can control them both from the same control application, along with all of the mobile devices currently used in your infrastructure.

Other than that, Security Center lets you monitor all events and tasks within the corporate infrastructure. And visibility is actually a major factor in ensuring security of all systems, both physical and virtual.

More details about Kaspersky Security for Virtualization are available in this presentation: