CompTIA Exam Prep - ITF+, A+, Network+, Security+, CySA+

VM sprawl is the uncontrolled proliferation of virtual machines beyond what an organisation needs, tracks or maintains. It is a governance failure with real security consequences, and the exam treats it as both. Why it happens Provisioning became trivial. Creating a physical server meant procurement, delivery, racking and cabling — weeks of friction that acted as an unintentional control. Creating a VM takes minutes and a few clicks. The specific drivers: no approval process for new instances; test and development machines created for a purpose and never removed; cloning as the default way to build, so one template becomes dozens of variants; no ownership recorded, so nobody knows whether a machine is still needed; fear of deleting something that might matter; and in the cloud, no capacity ceiling to force a reckoning. The last point is worth dwelling on. On-premises virtualisation eventually runs out of host capacity, which forces a clean-up. Cloud simply bills more, so the constr...