NOREX News section will be updated frequently with member alerts, news releases, helpful links, event notices, member gold nuggets, resource additions and helpful community building information. If it's new, you will find it here.
Members who are implementing virtual desktops have concerns about mixing them with standard desktops and the possibility of compromising security, on both machines.
During the recent Web Monitoring and Security WebForum, members with mixed virtual and standard desktop environments discussed the issue, with most participants feeling that a virus infection on a standard desktop will not affect the virtual machine, and vice versa.
JR: “I think that the stuff we have in place right now does a very good job of keeping the systems pretty safe and when any machine is compromised, it stays very contained to that machine....if one desktop is compromised I believe when they log out that desktop is wiped out and it is re-created for the next person.“
Andrew: “We are just starting to look at that and I am not envisioning having very different protection between my virtual machines and my standard machines and so far I am not seeing it as an issue. We will see as we get further down the road.”
Joe H.: We have been told by our vendors that there will be two separate issues, the stand alone and the virtual, so you will either loose one or the other. It looks like we would be able to do cross licensing on the anti-virus protection so we wouldn’t have to buy any more licenses for the virtual as it were. If we did have a virus problem or an issue with the virtual desktop that would go down, we would go ahead and replicate a new one that would be error free. That is the way it stands as far as we know but we are in our infancy and just researching products yet so we are still trying to find out for sure.
The other thing that we were told was the capability of file transfer between the virtual desktop and the host desktop, what kind of file transfers we had between them, also could affect the flow of malware and viruses or whatever between the two platforms.”
Eric S.: From my perspective I think the nature of the threat has changed dramatically in terms of you don’t get a lot of things that are replicating any more. Most of them seem very content to impact one workstation at a time and control that workstation. I am not sure if this type of threat has kind of been left in the past at this point.”
Participants also shared details on the effectiveness of their anti-virus, anti-spam solutions, and statistics on the number of websites which are blocked per user, per month.
NOREX members may download the WebForum transcript at anytime. Non-members can contact us for more information.