Virtualization

Over the past three years Context has gathered statistics from a range of IT security activities and consultancy engagements. One of the most common activities performed during this period has been web application penetration testing. This whitepaper will provide a unique insight into the state of web application security, presenting penetration test analysis drawn from a dataset containing nearly 12,000 confirmed vulnerabilities, found in almost 900 pre-release and production web applications during the period between January 2010 and December 2012.

Key Capabilities Provide Far-Reaching Benefits
 
Virtualization frees IT from the shackles of the complex environment we’ve created in many
important ways. Before getting into greater detail, though, first there are a few fundamental reasons
that allow virtualization to deliver better economics and improved IT flexibility:

  • Virtualization permits a single physical server to run multiple server instances in isolation from each other as “virtual machines” (VMs).
  • Automated management tools can allocate any amount of a physical server’s capacity to a VM, allowing it to scale up and down as necessary while sharing that server with other VMs.
  • The entire operating system and application environment is stored on a virtual disk, which can be easily duplicated to create new VMs.
  • VMs are highly portable, allowing IT to quickly migrate them between physical machines to allow maintenance on the physical hardware or balance workloads across your entire infrastructure. In addition, if a physical server fails, its VMs can be quickly restarted on another system.
  • Time spent on routine IT administrative tasks
  • Backup and data protection.
  • Application availability.
  • Ability to respond to changing business needs.
  • Business continuity preparedness.
  • Company profitability and growth rate.

Virtualization Frees Information Technology To Do More

When making the business case for server virtualization, most firms interviewed by Forrester
preferred total cost of ownership or short-term return on investment (<12 months) as their primary
decision-making tools (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). The majority of the interviewees we spoke with
said that they recouped their investment in virtualization within one year, with some companies
breaking even within a few months. While most companies built their business case on a foundation
of cost savings, better business continuity/disaster recovery and faster time-to-market for new
applications were top motivators as well.

Improve IT Responsiveness

Nine out of 10 IT departments spend at least half of their time doing routine administrative tasks, such as adding and managing new server workloads, adding new employees or developing and launching new applications. SMBs who have implemented virtualization reported productivity gains with 73% seeing significant improvements in time spent on routine administrative tasks. Interestingly, IT decision-makers (ITDMs) feel their departments are more responsive than business decision-makers (BDMs) do; 33% of ITDMs say their IT department is very responsive, while only 18% of BDMs say their IT department is very responsive to company needs.