Data center security is critical to ensuring government agencies, healthcare organizations, and businesses around the world avoid the consequences of a major cyber attack taking place. With the latest round of ransomware attacks around the globe expected to cost businesses more than $5 billion and an unknown sum in their reputations, data centers today face an ever-evolving threat landscape.
This doesn’t include the attacks that happened just last month. Today, the questions most organizations face is no longer “if” but “when” the next one will occur, which is why they must take action to protect themselves from known and unknown threats.
As Tony Antony, Marketing Manager for Cisco Data Solutions writes in his latest blog post, threats today come from both inside and outside the firewall and users need more than a “trust and verify” approach to defend themselves from cyber security threats and attacks. Tony stresses that security must go beyond the perimeters and be pervasive on every device – from switches to routers – as attacks get more sophisticated and exploit both hardware and software vulnerabilities. What is instrumental to a truly secure data center is the trust and transparency of a trustworthy system.
What is a trustworthy system? Antony provides the following fundamentals below:
- Trustworthy systems ensure software code is authentic and no physical or software tampering has taken place.
- A full, secure development cycle, such as secure software delivery, as well as secure boot, storage, and data recovery mechanisms.
- They have authentication and access controls in place such that the system can verify digital identities to assure authorized clients are using authorized services at all times.
- They contain next-generation encryption techniques.
- Finally, trustworthy systems are developed by vendors that design, develop, manufacture, sell, and service the product as documented.
Cisco Trustworthy data center systems are built on a comprehensive and pervasive set of security, data protection and privacy solutions delivering both network and infrastructure-level security. This can get as granular as ensuring that your software code is authentic and no physical or software tampering has taken place. The mechanisms for this are part of a full secure development lifecycle such as secure software delivery, and secure boot, storage, and data recovery mechanisms. Not all attacks can be prevented, but by protecting your networks through trusted vendors you will ensure integrity and end-to-end security in your data center.
Learn more about how to build a Cisco Trustworthy Data Center here.
