Juniper Networks and Altor teamed up at VMworld 2010 to conduct a real-time survey of customer and enterprise needs, looking at their own current offerings to determine the best course for their future pipeline.

The two cloud companies, which have an established business partnership as well, found that over a third of the 200+ firms at the conference have security intensive environments, with over 90% of workloads requiring protection. While virtualization is a necessary step for the participants, there’s a good amount of concern around the mixing of workloads, which, for many, has become a byproduct of the virtualization journey.

Over 70% of respondents are in fact mixing workloads on the same hosts, with a third of those believing the best way to secure them is with a unified solution spanning physical and virtual network environments.

That’s one area Juniper and Altor step in, working together to create a centralized interface that helps businesses navigate the virtualization journey. Part of Juniper and Altor’s partnership brings a unified interface for clients to manage these combined workloads.

Here are some key findings from the real time, VMworld survey:

* 40% of respondents cite time to deployment and cost as leading considerations in the virtualization of their critical workloads.
* 86% of companies consolidate mixed workloads (e.g. Web, App, DB) and notice amplified security risks, as a result.
* 63% of respondents state that their virtual infrastructure administrators or network operations staff, not security, is responsible for security.
* 34% rank unified management for physical and virtual network security as the most important security concern in their virtual and cloud infrastructure.

“We’re seeing the majority of enterprises virtualizing their mission-critical workloads concurrently with efforts to find the best way to secure them,” said Johnnie Konstantas, vice president of marketing, Altor. “The survey reveals the real struggle of today’s IT personnel to meet business objectives for increasing operational efficiency while maintaining or fortifying security. The responses are at times surprising in that they reveal workloads at great risk as a result of virtualization and organizations earnest in mitigating that risk as soon as possible.”

This feedback is also helping Juniper and Altor align their next steps, looking towards future implementations for jointly handling security with physical and virtual network environments. More integration, especially on Altor’s part, is something clients can look forward to, along with automating securities and virtual machines in order to become more dynamic.

In other news, Juniper has gone mobile with its enterprise solutions, launching an iPhone app this week.