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The use of virtual environments in data centers has grown rapidly and organizations have begun to use virtualization to help streamline their operations and reduce their operating costs. However, regardless of whether it is a physical or virtual environment, the need for security remains.

“According to Gartner, ‘through 2012, 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace, dropping to 30 percent by the end of 2015',” said Roger Pilc, general manager of the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit at CA Technologies. “As virtual server use continues to grow, organizations run the risk of losing control of their environments and the potential for malicious activity or user error increases dramatically.”

Meanwhile, CA Technologies has outlined plans to expand its cloud-computing security strategy, including immediate support for Google Docs by its CA Identity Manager product. The on-premises enterprise product CA Identity Manager, originally designed to exert identity and access management controls solely for internal resources, has already been expanded to support Salesforce.com apps. This gives enterprises using CA Identity Manager a way to exert the same credentialing and authorization security controls in the Salesforce.com and Google apps environments as they do internally under the centrally managed on-premises system.

CA is looking at becoming an identity service provider for cloud-based application environments, says Matthew Gardiner, director of the company's security and compliance business unit. In addition, CA is looking to work with third-party services to support a variety of cloud-based services, for example log collection, using CA products.

"There are vertical industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing, where we would partner with third-party service providers," Gardiner says, adding specific announcements around CA's cloud strategy will be forthcoming later this year.

CA's moves could put it on a similar path as Novell, which during the past year has made an aggressive push to adapt some of its fundamental technologies in identity management to work in cloud-based environments.

Gardiner says the emergence of cloud-based computing is effecting change inside enterprises. "Every IT decision is being re-considered," he notes. The question "Why are we doing this?" is being applied to many internal IT systems.

In virtualized data centers, CA's addition of the Virtual Privilege Manager security solution to its CA Virtual portfolio secures console access to the hypervisor and manages privileged access to all of the virtual images running on the virtualization server as well as the service console.

Key capabilities of the solution include privileged user password management for the virtual machines and service console, fine-grained administrative access controls to the hypervisor service console, service console hardening, and original user activity monitoring in virtual environments.

CA's virtualization management portfolio aims to help emerging and large enterprises overcome virtual stall by providing a better way to provision, control, assure, secure and optimize complex virtualized environments.

It specifically addresses the VM stall faced by many organizations today. After virtualizing the “low-hanging fruit,” which typically means the conversion of no more than 20 to 30 percent of physical servers to virtual machines, a variety of factors can conspire to stall progress, including: complex application and infrastructure performance issues, security and compliance concerns, concerns regarding uncontrolled VM sprawl, capacity management complexity, staffing and skill levels.