Virtualized systems will increasingly be the target of attacks due to its increasing popularity in the enterprise world, according to an industry executive.

As virtualization becomes more widely adopted, hacking attacks will be soon to follow.

This is the view of Jon Ramsey, chief technology officer of Secureworks, who believes 2010 will see the flaws in virtualization exploited at a new level.

In an interview with IT PRO, Ramsey said: “I think virtualization has reached the tipping point… of market share. I think it is widely deployed enough now that it makes sense for criminals to start targeting it whereas maybe up until this year it wasn’t as widely deployed so they didn’t pay any attention to it.”

He said that the big vendors of the security industry have not started protecting this type of technology yet, due to a lack of exploits occurring - but this is set to change.

“The interesting thing in virtualization is you see a lot of new start-up companies creating new technologies specifically for the security of virtualization,” Ramsey added.

Ramsey believes that as more enterprises experience attacks against their virtualization tech and look to the security vendors for help, the bigger companies will take stock.

“I don’t see a lot of demand right now in the area of virtualization security but I think that will change this year and that will cause a market shift where the large vendors will buy all the startup companies,” he said.

Ramsey concluded: “If you look at the number of organizations that use virtualization technology, it is pretty widely deployed, and I think vendors are going to have to start [addressing it].”

In a related development, a research firm predicted that half of workloads will run on virtual machines by 2012, up from just 16 per cent now.

Gartner explained, in a report released in November 2009, that Medium-sized firms will lead the drive to use the technology.

But by the end of next year, businesses with 100 to a thousand employees will use virtualization more than the top 500 firms, the report predicted.

ITPRO