The cloud has offered unprecedented efficiency and agility. Whether an in-house private cloud, or migrating servers to Amazon or Azure, infrastructure as a Service has allowed businesses to spin up platforms, ready to take applications in seconds rather than days or weeks, and adjust capacity as required.

Virtualisation has brought its own set of security challenges and opportunities along with the power and flexibility it offers. However, if your business operates in the cloud, you need to consider the following:

• The impact of security controls such as antivirus and host-based intrusion prevention on virtualisation density and performance
• How hypervisor security impacts the security of the guest machines
• Whether the security of one guest can impact the security of a second guest running on the same host
• Whether moving guest machines from one host to another changes security controls for advanced features such as Software Defined Networks and Vmotion
• How to have network security controls such as firewall rules and intrusion prevention rules, follow guests and which can scale elastically as well as get relocated to other points of presence
• How to create templates that boot in a secure state, and patch machine images on start during elastic instantiation