For many IT managers, moving your company’s backbone to the cloud brings a certain sense of freedom. However, the task of caring for and protecting your assets remains. After all, the operative word in “virtual server” is “server”; virtual or not, it’s still a fully functioning server from an operational sense, carrying the same risks and vulnerabilities inherent in physical servers. You’ll need vulnerability management tools to ensure those servers are secure.

To that end, Qualys announced this week that QualysGuard—its cloud-based suite of security and compliance tools—now works with Amazon’s popular cloud services.

The rate at which new vulnerabilities are discovered is staggering. An estimate from 2010 put the figure at two per second. That may be on the extreme high end, but the point is that securing a server—virtual or physical—is a fluid, constantly changing process. You have to monitor regularly to determine which vulnerabilities your servers are exposed to, what the potential impact is, and what you can do to eliminate or mitigate the risk.

The new QualysGuard connector uses Amazon APIs to connect with virtual servers in the Amazon cloud. Businesses that use Amazon EC2 or VPC cloud services can use QualysGuard to conduct automated scans of virtual server assets, and generate reports to help IT admins address potential risks.

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