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Any Certified Virtual Security Professionals Out There?

Try Googling Virtual Security Professional. You’ll pull up one guy. One. Guess where he works? VirtSec vendor (and VMSafe partner) Catbird recognized the knowledge/skills gap and stepped up to the plate. They’ve minted a VSP cert and created a Virtual Security Professional program to spread the love through your local training vendor.

I caught up with Tamar Newberger from Catbird this afternoon to chat about VMsafe product development. Short answer, yes, like everyone else it's working on VMsafe products in conjunction with VMware. No, it can’t share details. Yet. When? Stay tuned for VMworld, perhaps a bit earlier if the stars align.

So what could Newberger talk about? It seems that along with pent-up customer demand for VMsafe goods, many sites are looking for VirtSec products now, VMsafe certified or not.

It also seems that many customers don’t really know what they need or what questions to ask about shoring up their VMware environments.

When a Catbird channel partner makes a sales call, one of the biggest issues is getting the right folks on the customer side of the table. Security folks? It turns into a virtualization briefing. VMware admins? Apprehension and angst arise when security policy details are brought up. x86 operations folks? They’ve already got IPSec and enterprise tools, thank you very much.

So Catbird came up with a two-pronged approach to help its partners out:

First, sell a Virtual Security Assessment (VSA). Customers kick the VSA off by downloading a virt appliance and leveraging Catbird's security-as-a-service model, which collects environmental data, identifies intrahost and inter-VM traffic issues, examines trust zones in Vmotion environments, etc. The pitch-line is A Physical For Your Virtual. The advert depicts a snapping rubber glove. You get the idea.

VSA clients then meet one on one with a virtualization security specialist to review their results, discuss organizational roles, separation of duties, management policies, etc., receiving recommendations for next steps and guidance on long-term solutions. Per Newberger, those recommendations don't always include a solution from Catbird.

Second prong? If the world lacks VirtSec specialists, help make more of 'em.

Catbird has created a curriculum for use in traditional IT training centers. A dozen or so folks have been certified so far. Catbird is hoping to certify a hundred-plus Virtual Security Professionals by year's end. I’m surprised it's taken this long for someone to come up with a cert program on topic. What do you think -- VSP, job of the future?

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