Today in their new incarnation data centers have become more dynamic and elastic. With all the up gradations and new technology powering todays data centers it could possibly be the case that your network was designed as per the principles of last century's security parameters and is composed of legacy infrastructure. And this could be very dangerous from point of view of today's security. Throwing everything away and starting from the scratch can very well be financially unfeasible and operationally unproductive, but organizations cannot keep using the last century's techniques to fight the modern cyber warfare. Therefore, many enterprises and organizations are moving to adopt the cloud infrastructure in order to reduce the hardware footprint, costs and efforts it take to manage these servers. Tis way they are able to leverage the advantages of on demand compute and storage resources.
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Whether you are an enterprise looking to evolve your data center or infrastructure as a service provider offering compute and storage services to the organizations it goes without saying that your security strategy must evolve with time. Securing the data is imperative but the question is from where one should begin?
In order for an organization to scale safely t latest security parameters they need to start small very small and work their way up.
Organizations still need firewalls and intrusion detection systems in order to monitor the traffic coming in and going out. But due to possibility of an attack which involves compromising a fairly weak resource and then using it as a pivot point to scale up toward more critical resources of the organizations; a security strategy is imperative which focus on what’s happening inside the data center and in the cloud itself.
For protecting the data micro segmentation can be used to partition the workloads and their interaction with each other. Each such grouping then can form a smaller protectable unit, each of which can easily be accompanied by its own layer of security. Now you still have firewalls and other devices but now they are just a single layer in multi-layer security defense structure. And those micro segmentations at the workload level and not just at network level offer an additional layer of security (fine-grained).
With micro segmentation in place the management at this level is actually easy. Firewalls allow network security admins to collect, aggregate and visualize the entire traffic behavior. These tools also define all the security policies and parameters which can then be defined and applied throughout the system.
The migrations from the traditional server to IaaS can be tricky for those organizations which needs strong access control, logging, continuous monitoring and sensitive data inventory for the compliance purposes. Here micro segmentation takes all the burden away of protecting the dynamic computing environment. It also allows server owners to impose more fine grained control on the server for the organization security needs. This enables enterprise to get on demand workloads of any scale with system integrity and security intact.
We have already move past the boundaries of manual controls and they have been replaced by automation, virtualization and cloud. The new model offers flexibility, speed and portability which old model couldn’t even come close to. On top of this technology like micro segmentation adds security by keeping things small and contained and simultaneously allowing the environment to scale and expand up.
