McAfee Inc plans to introduce products this year to keep hackers away from the fastest-growing type of computers in corporate data centres: virtual servers.
Chief Executive Dave DeWalt said on Thursday his company would update existing products and introduce new software using virtualisation technology. They include ones to protect so-called virtual machines created with software from VMware Inc.
"There is a suite of products coming for virtual environments," he said in an interview with Reuters. Virtualisation is technology that uses software to boost the efficiency of hardware devices. VMware's top-selling product allows one server computer to perform the work of 10 or more servers. Other virtualisation products allow one machine to run multiple PCs or several computers to share storage.
McAfee's services arm, Foundstone, has a rapidly growing business that can search for vulnerabilities in systems that use VMware software and conduct tests to see if they can hack into those systems, DeWalt said. VMware, which is majority owned by EMC Corp, dominates the market for server virtualisation software.
Citrix Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp, Oracle Corp, Red Hat Inc, Novell Inc and privately held Virtual Iron sell products similar to VMware's virtual server software.
Symantec Corp, the world's biggest provider of security software, already incorporates protections for virtual servers into its existing products, said Bruce McCorkendale, who oversees the company's development of virtualisation products.
More than 80 percent of the time, there is no difference in the software that companies need to protect a virtual server from what they would use to protect the physical server on which it runs, he said. "Mostly what we have been doing so far is adapting our existing functionality for the virtual environment," he said.