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It is estimated that 25% of SMBs use virtualized environments and the forecast for the coming years looks very promising. There are various benefits gained with virtualization, such as, lower operational costs, resources scalability, IT automation, faster deployments of application servers and many more features. On the other hand, we tend to ignore or give low importance to challenges or risks that are introduced with virtualized environments. As the overall benefits outweigh the challenges, the perceived risks are low! Is this the approach we need to take to move forward towards secure and stable virtualized environments?

What are the new challenges introduced with virtualization? As opposed to the traditional environment, we can hardly define a control structure for a virtualized environment. With the greater flexibility and rapid provisioning there is a risk of sprawl management and with the decentralized unrestricted access management, there is a risk of non-compliance or security breaches – virtualized control management needs to take a new form! The challenge is to create a structure that is dynamic, portable and accurate.

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The Native backup utility found in Windows XP operating systems helps you protect data from accidental loss if your system experiences hardware or storage media failure. The backup storage medium can be any local drive but I recommend using a separate storage device such as, a removable disk or a large capacity USB drive. If the original data on your hard disk is accidentally erased or overwritten, or becomes inaccessible because of a hard disk malfunction, you can easily restore the data from the archived copy. Additionally, the backup utility helps you take a copy of your computer’s System State, which includes the system files and the registry while you can schedule regular backups. The backup program creates a volume shadow copy of your data, that is, creates a temporary copy of the data, including open files that are being used by the system.

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