Yes, before you start to wonder what ever happened with Tinder Stratus, I’ve been enjoying some well-deserved downtime. I’m going to be cutting down the blog to write as much as I can, but as cloud starts to ramp up in Canada, I am going to be working on a few other side projects. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, and since it’s Tuesday, I am happy to get back into the swing of things with a quick update from a security company that I first came across years ago, and are still creating some great solutions, especially now for the virtualization space.

Tripwire’s ConfigCheck is a great (and free!) utility that helps organizations get a quick picture of how secure their VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 hypervisor is by measuring it against the VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening guidelines. While there are some other tools that do similar types of verification, I like that Tripwire not only identifies the vulnerabilities, but since it was designed from the ground up with VMware, it provides the steps towards full remediation of the vulnerabililities.

But why is something like this so critical? Well, as organizations struggle to identify security deficiencies within their virtual environments, tools like this make it a lot easier by giving a standard baseline for which to start. While it’s not a replacement for having experienced security folks, it’s a great solution for midmarket or other organizations who don’t have such luxury.

Aside from discovering vulnerabilities, ConfigCheck helps organizations deploy virtualization in a manner that is safe and secure, increase the security posture of the entire organization, reduce configuration drift and easily implement security and compliance best practices. It’s a cheat sheet if you will, to help identify and manage vulnerabilities in your virtual environment.