In addition to custom hardware (like the crypto cards modoc mentions downthread) you also have to look at the potential liabilities you face. If you're involved in a HIPAA compliant environment, or one where you are storing large amounts of personal information, it may be a requirement that you have certain controls on physical access to the machinery and logical access to the data that are harder to guarantee with a VM Provider.
This isn't to say that a VM might not be perfectly acceptable for parts of your operation. But realistically, at this time if you look at the way most of the compliance documents for data security are written; you cannot be compliant in a suppliers shared virtualized environment.
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In addition to custom hardware (like the crypto cards modoc mentions downthread) you also have to look at the potential liabilities you face. If you're involved in a HIPAA compliant environment, or one where you are storing large amounts of personal information, it may be a requirement that you have certain controls on physical access to the machinery and logical access to the data that are harder to guarantee with a VM Provider.
This isn't to say that a VM might not be perfectly acceptable for parts of your operation. But realistically, at this time if you look at the way most of the compliance documents for data security are written; you cannot be compliant in a suppliers shared virtualized environment.