Data Center Security Solutions – Is Your DC Safe From Attacks?

Do you know how secure your data center is?

The denial of service attacks, data alterations, data breaches, are very common security issues that affect the data center environment adversely. According to the research of RiskBased Report, 7.9 billion records were exposed from servers in the year, 2019.

As we know, Data Centers are the centralized locations that provide the facility to house the critical components of IT Infrastructure, including computing and networking equipment for the purpose of Data storage, Data processing, or allowing access to a large amount of data over the internet.

However, as the quantity of data stored in data centers has increased, the task to make it secure by providing the proper security system becomes a tedious situation.

So, it is important to know that the data center company from whom you are taking services are following proper security measures & colocation for the data center.

This is the reason I have come up with this article where I will be going to cover all the data center security measures that you must check before procuring space from any data center company.

Before exploring the data center security measures, let's get in-detailed information about why the security of the data center is essential.

Data Center Security – Why It Is Important?

It is evident from the above that while selecting a DC partner, security is the most critical feature that an organization asks for as Data breaches and cyber-attacks are growing tremendously. These are some common attacks that happened in data centers from which we need to safeguard. This is the reason data center security is so important.

List of Most Common Attacks to Data Centers:-

• Unauthorized Access: When someone other than the authorized user tries to access the restricted resources by using the associated privileges of a compromised account.
• Denial of Service Attack: In this type of attack, the server denies providing the services as a result of malicious Cyber threats, because of which the legitimate user will unable to access the information systems, devices, and other network resources.
• Eavesdropping: An unauthorized interception of information that is being transferred between the client and the server.
• SQL Injection: It is basically an insertion of malicious code in SQL statements. It might result in database corruption.
• Internet Infrastructure Attacks: In this type of attack the malicious user targets the critical components of the Internet instead of individual networks.

Apart from the above attacks, there are many malicious attempts that can affect the security of data centers.

How to Secure a Data Center?

As we know, the Data Centers hold sensitive information, which is why these sites should be provided with physical as well as digital security. Physical security involves a wide range of strategies that are used to secure from outside interference. Whereas Digital or Network security is used to prevent malicious components from entering the network.

To provide an assured environment to the clients there is a need to make the Data Centers secure by using the latest array of technologies and practices.

Physical Data Center Security Standards

• Location: The data centers must be built on the right spot. It should be away from bad neighbors such as Airports, chemical facilities, power plants, etc.
• Physical Access Control:  It is one of the most important physical security elements of a Data Center means only authorized users should be able to access the key assets. This can be achieved by maintaining up to date access lists.
• Zero Trust Architecture: Every data center should follow the Zero Trust Philosophy. Every transaction request or iteration of data should be considered as suspicious. A periodic analysis of the behavior of the network should be there.
• Video Surveillance: CCTV security network should be there at every access point with advanced zoom features and at least 90 days video retention option. The backup of camera footage should be taken digitally to guard against unauthorized alterations.
• Bio-metric Authentication: Authenticate the users on the basis of physical characteristics such as thumbprints, voice, retina shape, etc.
• Regular Security Audits: To enhance the physical security of any Data Center, the regular security inspection is an ultimate option to find out the loopholes in the security procedure.
• Multi-Factor Authentication: Every Data Center should follow authentication based on multiple factors. Every access point in the Data Center should go through two or more identification procedures to prevent physical unauthorized access.

Network Data Center Security Standards

Network security plays an important role to prevent Cyber-attacks and hacking attempts by securing the networks of DC. Network security can be achieved by inspecting the network traffic and by using proper encryption techniques to transmit any information.

• Cryptography: To secure any Data Center at the network level the most important and basic requirement is to transmit the data over the network in encrypted form, which can be achieved by Cryptography. By using different Cryptography techniques the data to be transferred can be converted in the encrypted form which can only be understood by the intended receiver.
• Firewalls:  Firewalls are network security devices that can be in the form of software or hardware. They are used to monitor the traffic across the network to prevent unauthorized internet access.
• Intrusion Detection & Prevention Systems: IDS and IPS both are the network security infrastructure with different functionalities. The intrusion detection system can only analyze the network traffic to match the signatures of the packets with known Cyber attacks. Intrusion prevention systems also analyze the traffic over the network but it can also prevent the entry of suspect packets.
• Network Access Control: This technique helps to control who can access the network as it is necessary to recognize each and every device and user connected to the network in order to keep out potential attackers.
• Virtual Private Network: It is a private network that uses a public network to establish communication between the device and the network. It is another type of network security that is used to authenticate the communication between the device and the network by using IPsec and secure socket layer and is capable of encrypting the connection from an endpoint to a network.
• Network Segmentation: It is a process of splitting all the network traffic into different segments. This practice of dividing the network in independent Subnets results in increased performance and security.

Last Say On Data Center Security!

It is impossible to stop cyber-attacks and data breaches. But, we can opt for the measures that prevent those attacks. This is the reason the security of data centers is important as it stores the crucial asset, which is Data. Therefore, we have discussed all the Physical & Network Security measures of a Data Center in this write-up.