Extreme Computer Security

[DMB2000uk]

If I understand your question correctly then Virtual machines are what you need.

They run a computer inside a computer, and this will mean that if a testing application breaks the virtual machine, the host (the real physical) machine will still be fine.

You should look into programs like WMWare.

Dan

[smack323]

Hannah Ava - where are you located? or your company? what you are asking is something we do for our clients all the time. You can check out our web site at http://www.PDSPC.com or feel free to email me directly at [email protected] and i can put you in contact with someone who can help you. We have a vendor partnerships with VMWare and in most cases can get you much better pricing that if you went direct.

[DaddyRabbit]

[quote="Hannah Ava"] ... To create intellectual property and protection is a major priority for our clients, for which we need a safe way to interact with new software applications and internet solutions without introducing security risks to their work computer...
[quote]

Hanna Ava,

I'm kind of confused by the above quote.

How exactly are you testing this new technology. Do you get a new product from the client and run it in-house on your systems or do you go to the client site and run apps on their systems?

Assuming it is the former: Dan has good mojo

A "virtualization" solution allows for decent isolation for the host system from rogue applications. The "virtual" machines run off of self contained image files which also gives you the advantage (with an initial image and ongoing "snapshots") of quickly getting back to a known state if a change breaks things. This is an ideal solution in development systems where a lot of code or configuration changes happen and testing systems where there may be many unknowns, which sounds like your situation.

That said, virtualization is still relatively new in the grand scheme of things. While the virtual system runs in it's own "box" it still needs to access shared resources on the host system and the implications of this from a security standpoint (e.g. can a rogue application "break out" of the box and kill the host?) are still not fully understood.

If the situation is the latter however: While I can't endorse any specific company smack323 is giving good advice. The second situation puts you at great liability risk to the client if you break something so hiring a consultant or a solutions provider who does this for a living may save you a great deal of pain down the road.

Either way, unless your company absolutely can't afford it (and if not, save the money to implement it as soon as you can) should be a test/development network that is isolated from your core business systems as much as possible.

[Addison Lopez]

You can try for some virtual machine that can evaluate new software applications and is capable of browsing the web safely. Using such VM on the main machine, would enable to run one or more separate virtual machines.

I hope this helps.