Introducing the CSA’s New Virtualization Working Group

There’s been a lot of noise around the establishment of new working groups at this year’s Congress and today we’d like to also introduce another important addition: the Virtualization Working Group. Chaired by Kapil Raina of Zscaler, the Virtualization Working Group is chartered to lead research into the combined virtualized operating system and SDN technologies. The group will build upon existing Domain 13 research and provide more detailed guidance as to threats, architecture, hardening and recommended best practices.

Why a Virtualization Working Group?

Virtualization is a critical part of cloud computing. Virtualization provides an important layer of abstraction from physical hardware, enabling the elasticity and resource pooling commonly associated with cloud. Virtualized operating systems are the backbone of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

The CSA Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing focused exclusively on virtualized operating systems in Domain 13. Recent developments in software defined networking (SDN) show great potential to virtualize data networks in the same way that operating systems have been virtualized. Additionally, the future integration and potential convergence of virtualization of operating systems and networks promise to greatly impact the next generation of cloud architectures. The security issues and recommended best practices of this broader view of virtualization merit additional focused research from a reconstituted version of the CSA Virtualization Working Group.

Initial Research

As part of its charter, the CSA Virtualization Working group plans to publish a Domain 13 Virtualization Whitepaper as part of the CSA Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing. The paper is scheduled for release at the upcoming RSA Conference taking place in February.

For more information about the working group, visit https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/virtualization/