The vast majority of companies have little or no security in place for their virtual systems. That is a scary statistic revealed in a survey of attendees at the recent VMWorld 2008 conference in Las Vegas. Shavlik Technologies said that it had surveyed nearly 300 IT virtualization and security specialists at the conference. It believes the survey demonstrates the high uptake of virtual machines (VM).

In general we are finding in talks with customers that at least 99% of them plan to add VMs now or in the near future," said Neil Butchart, MD at Shavlik EMEA. "It makes so much sense to deploy them, and now we see data centers full of VMs."

Despite this, Shavlik is concerned that for the majority of companies, security for VM is falling by the wayside.

The survey found that more than 80% of IT managers rated securing their virtual machines as "very important to critical", yet only 35% of those surveyed actually have security in place for virtual systems.