Frugal Tech Show: Speaking with Centrify at VMWorld 2009

Ken Hess and I talk to Frank Cabriof Centrify, which recently conducted a survey of 500 large businesses which use virtualization in their enterprise. The full results of the study, of which Centrify published today on their web site yielded some interesting and unexepected data:

Virtualization Market Dynamics: The survey results showed that server virtualization platforms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and they reflect the diversity of OSes in the physical server environments. 58% of the respondent organizations have Hypervisors from more than one vendor. They are deploying bare-metal hypervisors from vendors such as VMware and Citrix while, in parallel, they leverage virtualization technology built into the latest AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux and Windows operating systems. Over 24% of virtualized environments have no VMware at all and are using virtualized using solutions from Microsoft, IBM, Citrix, Sun, HP, and others exclusively and in combinations.

Centrify's study polled 30,000 enterprise customers, of which 500 returned complete survey results.

Security concerns: The respondents were forthcoming about their security concerns. Though they were implementing a range of security controls, they were not confident about whether they had complete control of the security of their virtual systems.  According to the respondents, security, compliance and operational issues were the top three concerns. 70% believed they had orphan accounts on UNIX/Linux, 44% shared root passwords, 55% were unsure about how well they managed privileged user accounts. Overall, concern about security was the leading reason (46%) that virtualization could be slowed. As the CSO of an enterprise with thousands of servers and more than 80,000 people noted in one of his responses, “We are playing catch-up, cost drivers pushed virtualization without [us] properly looking at [the] security impact.”

Download: Centrify_Virtualization_Survey_Detail_Responses (PDF)

Download: Centrify_Survey_Summary_Presentation (PDF)

Click here to Listen to the VMWorld Frugal Tech Show Podcast with Frank Cabri of Centrify, Inc.