Cybersecurity and Data Centres: How Safe is Your Information?
Data centres are used by countless businesses around the world due to their reliable nature and high-speed network access. With an increasing number of organisations turning to off-site data centres and service partners to meet their needs, just how safe is the information stored in data centres?
In this article we examine the cybersecurity standards that you should implement in your data centre or look for in a third party provider, how AI is helping to keep your information safe, and why physical access control also plays an important role in data centre security.
Cybersecurity Standards
Whether you have a data centre in-house or choose to use a co-location facility, there are certain cybersecurity standards that should be set in place to ensure the safety of your data. While there is no magic solution to keep your data safe, these international techniques are the industry standard for maximum data protection and cybersecurity.
ISO/IEC 27001 is part of the ISO/IEC 27000 family of standards and sets out guidance for an information security management system that ensures information security risks are evaluated and adequate security measures are designed and implemented to mitigate these. If your organisation or data centre service provider meets the necessary requirements, an accredited certification body can provide a certification following an audit. This accreditation ensures that the best practices are following to keep your information safe.
ISO 15408 is another international standard and covers general computer security. Like ISO/IEC 27001, correctly implementing it warrants a certification. Usually referred to as the common criteria for information technology security evaluation – or CC for short – it sets out the necessary evaluations that should be performed on computer security products and systems, in this case data centre servers.
AI Making Data Centres More Secure Than Ever
The impact of AI on how data centres are designed and maintained is already clear in areas like workload prioritisation and cooling, but cybersecurity is another area being revolutionised by this technology.
A 2018 survey by Wakefield Research and Webroot found that 99% of US respondents already believe that AI will be able to improve cybersecurity in their business. While this doesn’t apply to data centres specifically, the general cybersecurity applications of AI mean that its implementation in data centres will make them safer than ever before.
Intelligent systems in data centres are able to keep your information safe because they can detect markers of suspicious activity far too subtle for humans to pick up on. Just one example of the many ways that machine learning and AI is monitoring server temperatures to spot any unusual activity.
Importance of Physical Access Security
As data centres often exist in a physical location separate from the businesses that own servers, physical security plays just a big as part as cybersecurity when it comes to the safety of your information.
Co-location facilities and on-site data centres are both susceptible to physical attacks from an individual looking to steal sensitive information.
Some basic physical access security measures that you should put in place to protect your information include electronic lock systems, card readers, and the monitoring of who has physical access to your data centre.