Today, nearly all companies realize the importance of protecting their physical computers and servers with anti-malware software, yet many overlook the vulnerabilities associated with virtual and storage environments.

what we call "VM sprawl." VMs are extremely easy to deploy, often taking just 15 minutes to bring up a new application. But this ease of deployment has spurred IT teams to create vast quantities of VMs, most of which have to be periodically taken offline for testing and backup. What’s more, many archived VMs are kept offline for extended periods of time without being patched or updated.

Until now, the task of patching and maintaining scores of offline VMs represented a huge headache for IT departments. Due to the management issues involved, most offline VMs are left unprotected, even though they faced possible attack as soon as they were brought back online.

To help solve this problem, McAfee® will soon release McAfee VirusScan® Enterprise for Offline Virtual Images, in conjunction with other updates to the McAfee VirusScan family of products.

VirusScan Enterprise for Offline Virtual Images scans, cleans and updates the anti-malware security profile on offline VMs without having to bring them online. This ensures that the VMs are safe and up-to-date with security signatures when they go live.

This can be a huge advantage in terms of time savings and peace of mind, especially when IT teams are working on tasks such as disaster recovery or testing and development in a virtual environment. For instance, disaster recovery can easily be thwarted by hacking attempts and system failures on active VMs, triggering backup to archived VMs. If these archived VMs are not secure, vital information and applications can be impaired, hindering business continuity.

VM security is also critical in testing and development cycles. During these cycles, IT teams often create hundreds of VMs which are then archived as they undergo revisions and quality assurance. When a final working scenario is selected, it is essential for the corresponding virtual image to be cleaned and updated with the latest security software and signature files.

McAfee VirusScan for Offline Images makes both of these scenarios—disaster recovery and testing and development worry-free, with support for leading virtualization vendors.

In addition to easing the burden on IT departments when it comes to working in a virtual environment, McAfee is also releasing an update to VirusScan Enterprise for Storage, which performs real-time anti-malware scans of every file that is added or modified on your Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. VirusScan Enterprise for Storage now offers support for more than 75 percent of all NAS capacity deployed worldwide, including key vendors, such as NetApps, EMC and Sun.

VirusScan Enterprise for Offline Virtual Images will be released in the third quarter of this year, and VirusScan Enterprise for Storage will be released at a later date.

Of course, we realize that managing multiple security solutions is also a cause for headaches. That’s why the McAfee VirusScan family of enterprise products can be easily managed through McAfee’s central management console, the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO™). ePO significantly reduces the time and cost of managing multiple endpoint security solutions by allowing you to extend protection throughout the enterprise environment from one management console.

Here at McAfee we realize that convenience is as important as securing your enterprise systems because if a security solution is not easy to use, it often won’t be used at all. To prove this, we just need to look at virtual environments. Until now, managing hundreds of offline VMs was a daunting task. Hopefully, with the introduction of McAfee VirusScan for Offline Images, all of our virtual environments will become a lot safer and incredibly easy to manage.