Security through isolation
Steve Mansfield-Devine · Computer Fraud & Security · 2010
In an imperfect world, keeping yourself safe is often about damage limitation. Given that there's no such thing as foolproof security, and the potential for compromise always exists, how do you reduce the amount of mayhem that malware or a hacking attack can do? One approach is to follow the example of the intelligence community – compartmentalisation: keeping each part of the system separate, so that a problem in one area cannot affect the others. The technology that allows us to do this is virtualisation.