Understanding and Mitigating Risk From Data Center Threats

Virtual appliances. Many organizations are now deploying security appliances within numerous points in the data center. No longer bound by the physical aspect, virtual appliances can roam between physical hosts and have visibility into more parts of the network. Plus, they’re easier to manage from an agility perspective. Furthermore, administrators can dedicate a virtual security appliance to a specific function. This means an appliance can reside departmentally doing a certain type of service for that team. For example, Fortinet’s FortiGate Virtual Appliances create a new layer of security for a physical and virtual infrastructure. By placing these virtual appliances inside of a network, you’re able to monitor for intrusion prevention, malware, unauthorized devices, network viruses, and much more. This could prove to be much more expensive when doing something similar with a physical device.  

New scanning engines. Advanced deep scanning engines like data-loss prevention (DLP), intrusion detection/prevention services (IPS/IDS), and even device interrogation helps lock down an environment. Creating intelligent network monitoring algorithms allows administrators to control what data flows in and out of the environment. Furthermore, these new engines help control the various consumer devices that are trying to enter the environment. Security administrators can allow or prevent access from certain types of devices. In fact, they can even geo-fence their environment and prevent devices from access given an unsecure connection. Then, these devices can be interrogated, authorized and even provisioned all through secure corporate communications

Creating layered security. The idea is to create intelligent security layers within your data center to secure the entire environment. The most important point to consider is that layers security can be logical, physical – or both. Security professionals can align necessary resouces with appropriate security measures as needed. For example, Entire applications can be placed behind intelligent, heuristic, learning engines which monitor for anomalous activity. Not only do they protect internal resources, they continuously monitor these applications against signatures based on public vulnerability databases (e.g. Snort, CVE, Bugtraq, etc.). There’s also the physical side of the security. Virtualization is certainly very cool, but what happens when you need raw throughput as well as next-generation security? Physical security appliances are now being integrated with 10Gbe cards capable of even greater amounts of expansion. You can have the best core infrastructure out there, but if your edge appliances can’t handle the throughput, you’re going to have a serious bottleneck.