By Otieno Wandera
A top executive of a leading global IT security firm has challenged local firms to take up virtualisation trends to support the growing business in the country.
Stefan Tanase, the Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, says local firms stand to gain a lot by adopting this model.
“With 41 million people, Kenya is one of Africa’s fastest growing countries in terms of telecommunications infrastructure and as a result, its business landscape is growing, allowing for the opportunity of trends such as virtualisation to be embraced,” he pointed out.
Tanase said this trend allows IT managers to save on costs. “They always have the advantage of cost reduction and business optimisation,” he added.
“Considering the valuable business benefits that virtualisation offers, such as cost containment as well as a competitive advantage, it is easy to see why business models in Kenya should be evolving to adapt to a virtualised approach.” He observed that with the growth of virtualisation, threats have increased calling for the need to secure virtual environments. “This must be a key priority for Kenyan businesses to enable them effectively embrace this trend,” he said.
Tanase revealed that Kaspersky Lab has come up with various solutions to secure the virtual environments and Kenyan companies can benefit from the same.
“There are about 70,000 threats generated everyday and the virtual environment is not safe from this. But we have come up with appropriate ways to offer protection to such,” he said. Tanase was speaking on the sidelines of a global IT security seminar held in Nairobi recently.
This year, it is estimated that 60 per-cent of virtualised servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace – a statistic that businesses should take note of.
Virtualisation has already become a worldwide trend. 94 per cent of corporations ranked on the Global 500 list and 97 per cent of major US companies from the Fortune 1000 rating have already virtualised their servers. It is predicted that approximately 50 per cent of 86 architecture server workloads will be virtualised by the end of this year.
