Crafty bad actors can infect all of an organization's virtual machines at once, rendering tier-one applications useless.

After reading this article, I had a few dissenting thoughts, maybe someone will provide their perspective?

The article suggests not running critical workloads virtually based on a failure scenario of the hosting environment (such as ransomware on hypervisor).

That does allow using the ‘all your eggs in one basket’ phrase, so I agree that running at least one instance of a service physically could be justified, but threat actors will be trying to time execution of attacks against both if possible. Adding complexity works both ways here.

I don’t really agree with the comments about not patching however. The premise that the physical workload or instance would be patched or updated more than the virtual one seems unrelated. A hesitance to patch systems is more about up time vs downtime vs breaking vs risk in my opinion.

Is your organization running critical workloads virtual like anything else, combination physical and virtual, or combination of all previous plus cloud solutions (off prem)?

  • francisfordpoopola@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Would you care to expand on this? I understand many of the pieces mentioned but am not an expert on this and am trying to learn.

    • ramielrowe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      In a centralized management scenario, the central controlling service needs the ability to control everything registered with it. So, if the central controlling service is compromised, it is very likely that everything it controlled is also compromised. There are ways to mitigate this at the application level, like role-based and group-based access controls. But, if the service itself is compromised rather than an individual’s credentials, then the application protections can likely all be bypassed. You can mitigate this a bit by giving each tenant their own deployment of the controlling service, with network isolation between tenants. But, even that is still not fool-proof.

      Fundamentally, security is not solved by one golden thing. You need layers of protection. If one layer is compromised, others are hopefully still safe.