Recently, there was a news on the hacking of data centers where the major tech and fortune 500 companies’ login credentials were leaked, as there is a rise in these types of data center hacks and credential leaks, it is important to look into the preventive measures to reduce the risk of data center hacks in future.
What Are Data Centers?
A data center is a facility that provides shared access to applications and data using complex networks, computing, and storage infrastructure. Modern data centers have evolved that connect on-premises with the cloud infrastructures where the networks, applications, and workloads are visualized in the public and private clouds. They are considered a critical business asset where the companies often invest.
Types Of Data Centers
- Enterprise data centers – These types of data centers are usually constructed and used by a single organization for their internal purpose, which is common among tech giants.
- Managed service data centers – These types of data centers offer aspects such as data storage, computing, serving customers directly, and other services as a third party.
- Colocation data centers – These types of data centers function as a kind of rental property, in which the space and the resources of a data center are made available to the people willing to rent it.
- Cloud data centers – These types of data centers are distributed and sometimes are offered to customers with the help of third-party managed service providers.
Most companies are moving towards cloud infrastructure services, but most of the companies’ state that due to the lack of visibility, transparency, and accountability of public cloud services creates more workloads in corporate data centers.
Importance Of Data Centers
For an organization, data is an integral part that it is the essential component in the success and profitability of the businesses. As an organization processes with more data and becomes data-driven, the data centers become the greatest advantage.
Major Threats Associated With Data Centers
The data centers are mostly targeted by hackers, where there is a chance of stealing large amounts of data. Data centers are vulnerable to attack in some ways, that includes the following: The applications that are hosted on the data center infrastructure might contain vulnerable codes. Remote access solutions such as the remote desktop protocol and virtual private networks have been deployed by the companies when remote works were adopted by the companies during the time of the pandemic, these new access points were taken advantage by cybercriminals, who compromised credentials and unpatched vulnerabilities to gain access to and plant malware on corporate systems.
There are supply chain vulnerabilities that are also associated, where the organizations rely on the third-party applications that are deployed within the organizations. Security vulnerabilities are created by these third-party tools and the security of these third-party organizations and tools is relied upon by the data centers.
The impact on business is huge if there is a disruption in the operations of the data center, which is the most significant part of an organization’s IT infrastructure. In addition to the vulnerabilities of the data center, there are also two main threats to the availability and security of the data centers which are the threats to the underlying infrastructure and the cyber threats to the data and applications that are hosted on these infrastructures.
The first threat is direct infrastructure attacks, where there are three components that are associated with data centers which include – compute, storage, and network functionality. When there is exploitation against this infrastructure, then the result is that it greatly impacts the availability, performance, and security of the data center.
The second threat is Cyberattacks against hosted services, hosting business-critical and customer-facing applications is the purpose of the data center. There are several ways in which these applications can be targeted and exploited which include,
- Web and application attacks – Where web applications are greatly vulnerable to attacks.
- Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks – This type of attack threaten the availability, loss of revenue, customer, and reputation.
- DNS attacks – The data centers hosting the DNS infrastructure are vulnerable to threats.
- Credential compromise – The credentials that are breached through data breaches and other attacks can be used to access and exploit the accounts of the users online.
The above-mentioned are the vulnerabilities, potential threats, and risks of the data centers. Adopting and implementing security solutions plays an integral part to address these types of threats.
Steps To Improve Security
The data centers being the prime target for hackers, so improving security measures might reduce the chance of data theft.
European Union has introduced data center privacy and security guidelines and regulations that need to be complied with.
In UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) offer security guidance to data center operators and users. Since the operators and the users have a great responsibility to protect the data they hold and process, failing to perform this might create a massive risk.
It is also important to understand the security measures that are used for a particular type of data center.
Implementing a data center security strategy requires deploying a range of security solutions and implementing the best practices. The following are some of the considerations for data center security:
- Prevent vulnerability exploitation
- Implement network segmentation
- Secure development pipelines
- Deploy web application
- Use Cloud-Native Security Solutions
- Protect against DDoS attacks
- Prevent credential theft
- Secure supply chain
- Protect personal data.
It is high time to secure the data centers, by adopting data security measures. So those responsible for data centers of their organization should make appropriate plans, to detect and minimize the happening of cyberattacks.
