Security Considerations for Cloud-Ready Data Centers

Overview

Data centers have evolved significantly as organizations consolidate servers, applications, and other resources. Technologies such as server virtualization, distributed application tools, and IP-based storage are helping organizations maximize their data center resources, while at the same time making it more difficult to protect these critical assets against cyber theft and increasing levels of malware, in addition to new vulnerabilities introduced by data center technologies themselves.

To effectively manage the new risks, organizations should reevaluate their data center security practices and implement new network-centric capabilities to ensure the integrity of their services. A network-centric approach to providing security in the data center delivers benefits such as scalability, unified security policy definition and enforcement, visibility into application traffic, and reduced operations overhead.