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data center security

4 Ways to Improve Security Insufficiencies in Your Data Center

Every year, cyber-attacks have increased in the severity of their impact.

They’ve become more destructive and costly to organizations across the world. According to a 2017 Ponemon Institute study on the cost of cybercrime, the cost of data breaches are on the rise. On average, 130 security breaches occur yearly, with a total of $5 million per breach.

The effect of security breaches has been far reaching. If facilities face downtime, employees can’t work and operational systems breakdown. For example, Atlanta’s government fell victim to a crippling ransomware attack, which shut down the city’s online systems for 6 days, affecting both government employees and residents.

As cybercrime continues to grow in sophistication, IT managers must explore security protocols to mitigate escalation.

Uncover security insufficiencies in your IT infrastructure and better prepare for potential risks with these best practices.

Designing Data Center Security Architecture

One of the key findings of the Ponemon study, was for organizations to better balance investments in security technologies.

Therefore, when deploying or upgrading your IT infrastructure, it’s essential to design with cybersecurity prevention at the forefront.

Cybersecurity prevention requires a comprehensive approach, including assessment of physical and external threats to the environment. To start, evaluate who has access to the network, applications and the facility, but also access to the actual physical assets as well. Is your facility using any advanced security intelligence or access management system? Are there any opportunities for growth?

Assessing Criticality of Data Center Equipment

In the event of a security breach, not all applications are equally critical or sensitive to disruption.

Instead, as part of your proactive strategy, assess the infrastructure’s IT needs and the underlying components that support them. Identify which equipment needs more investment in redundancy and resiliency solutions. Are essential equipment and applications running the latest updates?

Develop a data center security checklist to help address every aspect of equipment including firewalls, threat detection, anti-virus, tools, patches and more. Also, create a criticality inventory of all IT, network, storage, and IP assets, as well as any other directly or remotely connected systems, including edge locations.

And most importantly, regularly test equipment systems to the recommendations of the spec sheets. This will help your organization identify vulnerabilities and the necessary steps to address them.

Optimize Your IT Team

Knowledge is power. Implement a cross-functional security training team to address the unique security challenges of your infrastructure while equipping them with the necessary technical knowledge of the facility operations.

Additionally, update protocol policies, including access points. Assign roles based on individual employee’s authority or specialty, and create unique login and usage policies for compliance. Include basic components like changing passwords every 90 days, or enabling two-factor authentication.

As part of your updated protocol policies, include instructions for a disaster recovery and management plan.

Deploy a Data Center Infrastructure Management System

For optimal prevention, use an advanced Data Center Infrastructure Management system.

DCIMs’ improve the availability of critical information required to ensure uptime in high availability data center environments. They provide unique monitoring and control applications, real-time insights, which allows your facility to improve security and operate at peak performance.

Partner with Us

As your local Vertiv business partner, we’ll help you stay on top of the rapidly changing data center security trends and protect your IT environment. We can provide industry insight and expertise to help increase efficiency, reduce costs, and maintain availability.

Connect with us today to learn more about how we can help you achieve your data center objectives.

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