Maintaining the safety and security of your data is crucial, whether your company is a government agency, commercial enterprise, or educational establishment. Data centers are always vulnerable to security attacks owing to their vast quantity of essential data.
Unauthorized access, both accidental and malicious, accounts for 9-18% of all breaches and costs the global data center sector $400 billion annually. It is no surprise that data center security management is a significant issue for contemporary organizations, given the increasingly stringent enterprise needs and industry laws.
In addition to other demands like ensuring uptime, boosting efficiency, and maintaining data center redundancy, data center managers must ensure their security while granting technicians and contractors the necessary access. In this piece, we’ll discuss data center security and various ways you can secure your data center.
What Is Data Centre Security?
The term “data center security” refers to the methods, rules, techniques, and technology used to secure the facility’s physical and virtual assets. Security measures must protect data centers against both internal and external threats.
Data center infrastructure is always at risk from cybercrimes such as data loss, data tampering and corruption, DDoS assaults, SQL injection, eavesdropping, tailgating, and intellectual property theft.
Data center security services include the technological and physical safeguards to secure and protect a data center’s assets and resources.
That involves protecting it from internal and external attacks. A comprehensive security strategy, including maintaining data center redundancy, is crucial as it covers all parts of a data center, including the networks, servers, power systems, and the data and procedures it supports.
Ways on How to Keep Your Data Centre Secure
Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of data center security let’s look at the recommended practices for achieving optimum physical and virtual security. Since it is difficult to cover every approach and metric that is available, we will focus on the most significant ones.
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Multiple-Layered Access Control
Layer-by-layer management is the most effective and strategic approach to guarantee data center security. Multiple layers provide a structured physical protection paradigm, making it easier to analyze defects and implement effective protection measures for each layer.
For instance, walls and obstacles are installed outside to safeguard and separate the data center. Secure staffed checkpoints are located at the entrances, where visitors must first register and have their identities verified by security staff.
Employees may depend on access cards to enter the data center gates. To further restrict unauthorized access, more sophisticated identifying methods like fingerprints or biometrics are needed for increasingly significant levels.
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Granting Permissions Depending on Roles
In 60% of cases, threats to data center security are internal. Reducing the access that teams have to data center resources is essential for mitigating intentional or unintentional risks.
Limit the locations, devices, and features your staff may access and use inside your data center using your data center infrastructure management (DCIM). You may stop unauthorized modifications by giving various users and user groups distinct rights.
For instance, whilst another user may only examine the devices in the data center, one person may be allowed to modify a single PDU in a cabinet. Role-based permissions may limit your provider’s technicians or managed services team from making changes to equipment in colocation data centers.
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Securing Your Data
Data center security and data security go hand in hand. To safeguard and maintain data, all data must be extensively encrypted during transit and storage, constantly watched, and backed up regularly.
Furthermore, data security protocols must adhere to current trends, methodologies, and technology. Strong password rules and a positive cybersecurity culture must be implemented for all staff who come into touch with data.
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Install a Man Trap
A man trap is a tiny room outside the data center with one data center access door and one non-secure exit door. Man traps restrict access by only allowing one door to be unlocked and opened after the other has been locked and closed. Authentication processes may be needed at both doors or the data center entrance.
Both doors may need distinct security credentials, and if access is prohibited at any time, an alarm may be sent to the data center management or IT operations team.
Man traps prevent unauthorized persons from piggybacking into secure zones. However, they are a costly investment, so you should consider if your organization needs this additional intrusion protection layer.
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Monitor and Audit Routinely
The more people are familiar with the protective system, there is the sudden development of many strategies or tools to avoid or compromise any of these measures.
Therefore, it is crucial for data center’s longevity they undergo constant review and assessment of the physical security measures in place. CCTV cameras, firewall activity logs and access logs should be reviewed periodically.
Verify that security measures are effective by doing internal audits, and consider engaging an outside auditing firm. Regular monitoring and auditing will show where a policy has been violated or a weakness realized early, and the necessary change can be made quickly.
It may help safeguard your systems and valuable data in your new data center through this kind of data protection approach. This situation calls for being on high alert and even much more vigilant as these attacks can happen at any time within the current digital landscape.
To ensure that your data center security becomes a success, you should set appropriate security measures that you need to implement and monitor your security settings regularly.
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Educate Staff Members on Security Awareness
The two common methods employed by groups to penetrate an organization include phishing and business email compromise attacks (BEC). These attacks focus on manipulating the staff members into performing a particular act or a sequence of acts that will grant hackers entry to the data center’s systems without permission.
Social phishing attacks have hackers using voice and in-person contact methods to gain unauthorized access by convincing users. With security awareness training, employers can prevent cases of phishing and ensure workers do not become victims of fraud.
A data center must be monitored and protected 24/7, both physically and remotely. Follow the measures outlined in this article and invest in the suggested technologies to prevent and reduce risk in your data center.
Most importantly, invest in a security awareness training program based on science and analytics to help you maintain a safe and reliable workplace.
