IT managers appear to be at with IT security professionals over that question, even while sharing similar opinions on where risks might lie, according to a new survey.

The 2009 Security Mega Trends Survey from research firm Ponemon Institute -- which also looked at attitudes on other topics, such as outsourcing and Web 2.0 technologies -- shows roughly two-thirds of IT operations staff who responded said they felt virtualization of computer resources did not increase information-security risks. But about two-thirds of information security professionals surveyed felt the opposite way.

A full three-quarters of the survey's 1,402 respondents, all active in U.S.-based private sector firms or government agencies, said their organizations had already implemented virtualization of their computer resources, with about 90% in both the IT and security camps saying they were "familiar" or "very familiar" with virtualization.

The survey reflects the often upbeat attitudes about virtualization expressed by experienced IT pros about how the technology, most commonly that of , of , is bringing them the benefit of server consolidation.

"We started virtualization in a development and test environment, and now the main applications we have using VMware in production instances are file and print servers," says Rich Wagner, director of IT infrastructure at Columbus, Ohio-based Hexion Specialty Chemicals. Wagner says virtualization hasn't raised red flags as far as security requirements. The main concern, he says, is "from a performance standpoint -- the CPU and memory and disk I/O -- in sharing a large box," with database servers seen as a resource-intensive application that might not be well-suited for virtualization.