Data Center Security
What Is Data Center Security?
Data center security is the practice of applying security controls to the data center. The goal is to protect it from threats that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of business information assets or intellectual property
What is a data center?
At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. A data center's design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data. The key components of a data center design include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application-delivery controllers.
How does data center security work?
Data center security follows the workload across physical data centers and multi-cloud environments to protect applications, infrastructure, data, and users. The practice applies from traditional data centers based on physical servers to more modern data centers based on virtualized servers. It also applies to data centers in the public cloud.
Why does data center security matter?
Data centers contain the majority of information assets and intellectual property. These are the primary focus of all targeted attacks, and therefore require a high level of security. Data centers contain hundreds to thousands of physical and virtual servers that are segmented by application type, data classification zone, and other methods. Creating and managing proper security rules to control access to (north/ south) and between (east/west) resources can be exceptionally difficult.
Essential Solutions for Data Centre, Disaster Recovery and Branch Locations Security
DDI is shorthand for the integration of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (IP Address Management) into a unified service or solution. DDI comprises the foundation of core network services that enables all communications over an IP-based network.
Advanced DNS Protection
Advanced DNS Protection continuously monitors, detects, and stops all types of DNS-based attacks—including volumetric attacks and non-volumetric attacks such as exploits and DNS hijacking—while responding to legitimate queries. It also maintains DNS integrity, which DNS hijacking attacks can compromise.
Authenticated DHCP
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a network management protocol used to dynamically assign an IP address to any device, or node, on a network so it can communicate using IP Authenticated DHCP is the process of challenging a device before delivering a DHCP lease by authenticating that request against an authoritative user id/password store. A first step towards network access control.
Internet Protocol Address Management
The IPAM implementation is a feature-rich and easy-to-use solution that encompasses support for IPv4, IPv6, network discovery, and automated monitoring. IPAM provides tools that integrate the allocation, administration, reporting, and tracking of your entire network space.
IPAM (IP Address Management) is the administration of DNS and DHCP, which are the network services that assign and resolve IP addresses to machines in a TCP/IP network. Simply put, IPAM is a means of planning, tracking, and managing the Internet Protocol address space used in a network.
What is SD-WAN?
What is the purpose of an SD-WAN?
It enables organizations to securely connect users, applications and data across multiple locations while providing improved performance, reliability and scalability. SD-WAN also simplifies the management of WANs by providing centralized control and visibility over the entire network.
The SD-WAN solution includes a new set of devices called Gateways that inter-operate Switches and Instant APs to provide a full-fledged WAN architecture.
Based on the size of your branch setup, you can choose device combination that best suits your requirement:
Medium to large branches—For branches that require more than 24 ports, you can use a combination of Branch Gateways and one or more switches at the branch site, with Mobility Controller as VPN Concentrator at the data center.
Small to medium branches—For branches that require less than 24 ports (including all WAN and LAN ports), you can deploy Branch Gateways at the branch sites, with Mobility Controller as VPN Concentrator at the data center.
Micro branches—For micro branches, you can deploy an Instant AP cluster at the branch site, with Mobility Controller as the VPN Concentrator at the data center.
Figure 1 shows a typical deployment topology of an SD-Branch with Branch Gateways and a micro branch with Instant APs:
What is a Load Balancer and How Does Load Balancing Work?
When it comes to effective network operations, companies face two perennial problems: scalability (how many clients can simultaneously access the server) and availability (access with minimal downtime). The solution is load balancing in networking: using commodity servers and distributing the input/output load across those servers.
To expand on that, load balancing in networking is a process that spreads network traffic, computing workloads, and other service requests over a group of resources or services. The incoming network traffic is distributed over commodity servers to balance the overall workload. The key benefits of network load balancing are scalability, optimized service reliability, increased network availability, and overall manageability.
How Network Load Balancing Works
A network load balancer (versus an application delivery controller, which has more features is discussed below) acts as the front end to a collection of web servers so all incoming HTTP requests from clients are resolved to the IP address of the load balancer. The network load balancer then routes each request to one of its rosters of web servers in what amounts to a private cloud. When the server responds to the client, the response is sent back to the load balancer and then relayed to the client.
The beauty of load balancing in networking is that it is transparent to your clients because as far as they’re concerned there’s just one endpoint to talk to.
How Valuable is Load Balancing in Networking?
By implementing network load balancing, you’ll be solving multiple service issues:
