BeyondTrust survey reveals virtual insecurity among organizations

BeyondTrust has announced the results of its survey, Virtual Insecurity, that reveal organizations are relying heavily on virtualization vendors for security if for any security at all. Key survey takeaways from the 346 respondents that participated include:
42 percent do not use security tools regularly as part of their virtual systems administration
34 percent lean heavily on antivirus protection as a primary security tool
57 percent often use existing image templates for new virtual images
Nearly 3 out of every 4 respondents say that up to a quarter of virtual guests are offline at any given time
64 percent have no security controls in place that require a security sign off prior to releasing a new virtual image or template

“It’s surprising with all of the technological advancements in the virtualization space that server admins are reliant on antiquated security solutions and are unknowingly conducting day-to-day tasks that are incrementally increasing the risk to their organization,” said Brad Hibbert, vice president, product strategy and operations at BeyondTrust.

As an answer to these industry challenges identified in the survey, BeyondTrust has released Retina Plug-in for VMware vCenter. This new offering provides integrated security and vulnerability management tools needed to effectively identify and remediate network vulnerabilities that lead to exposure and malicious attacks in virtual data centers.

Download a free trial of the Retina Plug-in for VMware vCenter Here
“With Retina Plug-in for vCenter, we are bringing security context to admins by integrating comprehensive vulnerability assessment into a familiar management console,” said Hibbert. “Our tight integration with VMware provides simplified security views for the datacenter operations team ensuring virtual environments are safe and compliant.”

With Retina Plug-in for VMware vCenter, organizations can secure their networks by:
Accurately discovering all the assets managed by the vCenter server
Performing comprehensive vulnerability scanning with detailed risk intelligence for ESXi and virtual machines
Providing unique capabilities to scan online and offline virtual machines and virtual application templates
Supplying an automatic audit feed of latest vulnerabilities that could potentially impact the hyper-visor and virtual machines
Delivering risk context including scoring, malware toolkit analysis, penetration toolkit availability, compliance mappings to improve remediation planning
Providing prescriptive guidance in risk mitigation of missing patches, in-secured configuration and zero-day exploits
Scheduling scans to automatically update the vCenter console with centralized compliance and risk information
Seamlessly scanning all the ESXi and virtual machines managed by the vCenter server
Dynamically updating security scans to include all online and offline added/removed from vCenter management