Continuity Central: Data center users confront changing threat landscape

Blogger’s note: This article states “it is the long-standing threats of human error and physical security of the data centre which continue to be ranked of key importance by respondents to the surveys conducted for this report.” We agree.

Data centre security remains a critical issue for both end-user organizations and data centre and managed service providers, achieving top ranking alongside availability/resilience of data centre based IT services.

‘Data Centre Security, Current Practices and Customer Needs in Data Centre Security Specification and Operation’ is based on primary research including an end user survey, a survey of service providers, and interviews with end-users, vendors, service providers and industry experts. It also incorporates information from a wide range of sources covering physical, logical and people-related security measures.

The threat landscape is changing; one operator interviewed recorded 170-200 distributed denial of service (DDoS) events every two weeks. Of these, around one every week would be “a very large concerted DDoS attack”. Enterprises interviewed revealed their key concerns, but the report overall does provide evidence that a level of confidence in security standards is being achieved by most data centres.

more of the Continuity Central Article

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.