Virtual computing environments still need real security, and IBM says it has the answer: Phantom.

The company is set to outline a new research initiative at RSA 2008, designed to protect against new security vulnerabilities that arise when a corporation moves from a physical computing environment to a virtualised environment in which hardware is simulated and software is run on virtual machines.

At the core of Phantom is network and host intrusion protection software that sits in a secure, isolated partition and will, in essence, lock down the hypervisor, or virtual machine monitor.

IBM also will unveil details of IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager, which automates the management of encryption keys so that encrypted data on storage devices is safe if the device is lost of stolen.

In addition, the company has a new IBM Unstructured Data Security Solution to classify and secure unstructured data in all types of formats.

A new IBM Tivoli Security Information and Event Manager lets customers automate security management for the datacentre and manage policy compliance by monitoring user activity and server logs.

The company also has a new IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-business which offers a single view of user access to a variety of Web-based applications.