HP supports virus scanning for cloud security

HP thinks that taking a glance into the memory of virtual machines (VMs) on its system G-Cloud is the finest way of keenly monitoring for security vulnerabilities. HP spoke that its government-leaned G-Cloud system using virus scanner technology to scrutinize against VMs being tainted by malware runs amok on cloud operations. HP also stated that matching pattern of memory contents is parallel to techniques used by virus scanners also is currently the best probable technique to fight against security hazards in cloud deployments.

Cloud hosting services has become popular and, while the particulars are abstracted away from the user, a naive view of cloud hosting is the use of multiple virtual equipments represented as one unit. Security and management of those VMs have become progressively significant as outages like those at Amazon's EC2 with security infringes on Sony's Playstation Network have smack the headlines.

Considering that companies and users have turn out to be growing sceptical concerning the security of cloud services, it's no surprise that John Manley, HP's director of  Automated Infrastructure Lab states, "Cloud security is a big issue to tackle."

Users on public clouds, for example Amazon's EC2 service, may anticipate that their virtual machine is isolated from the hypervisor, the main software program layer that runs using the 'bare metal' from the server. Nonetheless if HP's high-end G-Cloud technologies, which can be pitched at governments and multi-national enterprises including banks, has got to peek within a VM's memory as a way to perform security watch, then users might doubt what happens in the event the hypervisor itself is cooperated.

Most concerning will be the firm's are convinced that substantial scale cloud deployments, regardless of who deploys them, grow to be instant targets for attacks. The important thing, it stated, would be to "provide a barrier between the VM and the cloud [the boundaries of the service domain]".

HP admitted that it is in a "security arms race" in order to secure the cloud and that peeking within a VMs memory is not the most effective remedy but will suffice for the next 5 years. The next stage, based on the firm, would be to function on hardening the hypervisor. The intrusive policies that HP and others deploy to guarantee cloud security may possibly rise queries about just how secure and data really is, when it is in the cloud.