Simon Crosby, the godfather of Xen, on virtualization, security and wimpy private clouds

03.11.2011

Is that something Bromium addresses that you can't talk about?

Right. I can't talk about it.

Do you ultimately see these problems being overcome and clouds becoming the trustworthy place you think it ought to be?

A: Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Look, if we don't I think it's fair to say there is no enterprise that will not be compromised. Every single record that we own in the enterprise space [will be at risk of] being available to somebody else. It is extraordinarily scary and there are bad things going on out there so we have to solve these problems, and the way to solve them is through better system design. Every vendor has a stake in this. The security guys do a much better job of finding the bad guys. The desktop virtualization folks are going about delivering more trustworthy systems. Most of that comes about by centralization but by courtesy of virtualization that's a property you get of always being able to revert to a good golden image. All that is good, but if I click on a bad PDF an attacker could still get on my virtual desktop and steal all the data. The DLP guys are trying to get tighter and tighter controls in terms of policy they hook into about where you can and cannot go. The problem with DLP is it doesn't actually get the opportunity to get between executing code and what happens. So it's mostly logging what happened rather than preventing that.

Will Bromium's product eliminate the need for any traditional security products?