Rational Survivability: Poetic Virtual Security

April 30, 2008

Poetic Virtual Security

I was at Starbucks with my four year old. She was laying down the Dr. Seuss
with aplomb so I was inspired to dig deep and show her how the old man can
ebb and flow.

I swear to $diety that upon hearing this she rolled her eyes and said something like "Dad, you had me at 'virtualization.' " At that point she quickly pointed to my iPhone and asked if I would purchase the latest Hannah Montana song on iTunes...<sigh>

You can see more of my poetic ramblings here (scroll down after the jump.)

When debating the future of secure virtualization
It's wise to reflect on its very creation

Some say poor code is the reason it's here
while others use doubt and (un)certainty's fear
Economically speaking the V-word's a boon
operationally, though, it showed up too soon

Duties, once separate, are now all a-blended
one moat, lots of castles -- the model's up-ended
Competency and skillsets come into play
Who owns the stack? Well, that's hard to say

Can an admin whose mad skillz focus on the OS,
really be trusted to manage this mess?

The virtual sysadmin owns the keys to the kingdom
but it's hard to fix hosts when you can't even ping 'dem!
Operational silos have now become worse
since the virtual admins control all the purse

The network and security wonks try to fudge it
but switches and firewalls just don't get budget
Security, network, storage, and host
if you push the wrong button it all becomes toast

Our current security solutions don't cope
but the dealers keep pushing their VirtSec straight dope

I don't want to come off like a VirtSec despiser,
but to protect our crown jewels it's all HYPErvisor
Don't worry my friends, no need to be scared
your whole infrastructure will be VMware'd
...or Xen'd, or sPath'd or perhaps Hyper-V'd
virtualization, I'm told, will solve everyone's need