A resilient data center is no simple thing to maintain — which is why many organizations fail to evaluate their resiliency until it’s too late. Infrastructure complexity, resource limitations, and constantly evolving cyberthreats make it tough to stay on top of risk mitigation.
But without the proactive investment in a stronger data center, it’s only a matter of time until unnoticed gaps become losses. Just one incident can lead to major negative business impacts: data loss, unplanned downtime, noncompliance fees, and even a loss of customer trust.
With decades of experience in the data center, GDT takes a comprehensive approach to building a cyber-resilient infrastructure. We offer expert advisory and professional services spanning assessment, implementation, and support. Plus, we work closely with the world’s leading data storage providers.
This two-part blog provides a high-level resource for evaluating the effectiveness of your own data center resiliency. In it, you’ll find a brief but detailed overview of the 10 most crucial components for a cyber-resilient data center, enabling you to get a clear picture of how to improve your data protection posture and address potential gaps.
1. Network Infrastructure
One of the first keys to resilience is a well-architected network. Of course, a data center cannot be secure and resilient unless all connected components are also performing well. Redundancy, security, and capacity are just some of the core considerations to address.
- Redundant network paths: Protect systems from outage by ensuring you have multiple network paths in place for failover in the event of a main system failure.
- Firewalls and security systems: Firewalls are a must to monitor and secure incoming and outgoing network traffic. A resilient network strategy will regularly monitor and update all firewalls and other network security systems.
- Bandwidth management: Whether the surge is expected or unexpected, increases in bandwidth demand can cause network performance failures due to lack of capacity. Ensuring sufficient bandwidth capacity with provisions for surge handling helps maintain business continuity and resilient performance.
2. Physical Security
While cyber resilience is normally equated to concerns around infrastructure components like data centers and networks, it’s worth noting that physical security plays a vital role as well. Risks can just as easily come from within an organization as from outside.
- Physical access controls: Any unauthorized personnel, regardless of intent, may cause a breach that potentially harms the business. Regularly implement and review solutions that provide the levels of access control appropriate for your organization, like biometric scanning, key cards, etc.
- Surveillance: Maintaining visual surveillance is a reliable way to help prevent unauthorized access and deter and identify suspicious behaviors. Make sure cameras are set up to monitor all key areas and consider purchasing or upgrading to IoT-enabled devices, which can leverage AI for enhanced facial detection.
- Perimeter security: Factors that are often overlooked in physical security include fences, doors, and alarms. Be sure a security team member is scheduled to regularly inspect fences and gates, security doors, and alarms for integrity. For some businesses, contracting on-site security personnel can be a wise investment.
3. Power, Cooling, and Fire Suppression
In addition to physical security, it’s important to plan for other things that could go wrong on premises. This means taking power and cooling infrastructure as well as fire protection into account.
- Power infrastructure: Ensure uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) are properly sized, regularly tested, and redundant. Backup generators need fuel levels, auto-switching, and performance checked and maintained. And power distribution units (PDUs) should be inspected for load balancing, redundancy, and proper function.
- Cooling systems: It can be easy for the energy generated in a data center to elevate temperatures to risky levels. At the same time, any HVAC failures could also result in risk to the data center. Ensure HVAC systems are functioning properly, with temperature and humidity controls dialed in for safety and performance. Also, ensure your business has a backup plan in place for temperature control in case your primary systems fail.
- Fire protection: Keep your data center protected from fire damage and loss. Actions to prioritize include testing your fire suppression systems, smoke and heat detectors, and emergency evacuation plans.
4. Cybersecurity/Ransomware Protection
Ransomware is undeniably tough to handle. Malicious actors are using AI and other advanced innovations for their own benefit, even as security solution providers work hard to stay on the cutting edge. An effective ransomware strategy prepares for any possibility, covering efforts to not only thwart potential threats but also identify risks and react quickly in the event of an attack.
- Protection: This category of activities covers a broad scope of processes that help prevent bad actors from successfully accessing your networks and data. These include patch and vulnerability management, data protection assessments, identity access management (IAM) maturity, micro-segmentation, and governance and compliance frameworks.
- Detection: To stand a chance against ransomware, it’s important to have technologies in place that can identify unusual or suspicious activity. Detection solutions include inspection strategies like signature-based behavioral analysis and network security infrastructure strategies like intrusion detection, as well as cloud security posture management and Dark Web monitoring.
- Response: Even following every best practice, no organization is immune to attacks. Preparing your organization to respond and remediate quickly is the best plan. This means having a robust disaster recovery plan, immutable data backups, incident response support, and regular unit testing.
5. Data Backup and Recovery
Sometimes, disaster strikes in the form of a cyberattack, such as ransomware, wherein data is often encrypted or stolen. Sometimes, it strikes in the form of a natural disaster, such as a fire, flood, or other event, causing a system outage and/or file corruption. In any case, the business can’t successfully move forward without access to your data. Having a resilient data backup and recovery plan in place is crucial. Some of the strategies you’ll need to have in place include:
- Regular backups: Identify which of your data is critical and ensure it is backed up regularly, copied securely, and stored off-site (air-gapped) if possible.
- Disaster recovery plan: Don’t wait until a disaster to see how long it takes to restore critical data. Every organization needs an up-to-date and regularly tested disaster recovery plan that includes set RTOs (recovery time objectives) and RPOs (recovery point objectives) based on the business’s needs and tolerance for risk and downtime.
- Data replication: Having only one copy of critical data is an incredibly risky move. One way to help prevent data loss is by implementing real- or near real-time data replication across multiple geographical locations — especially important if your data center is in an area prone to risk of natural disaster.
- Testing restores: Ensure that backups can be quickly and fully restored. Make backup restoration testing part of your regular incident response plan to ensure that, when push comes to shove, your backups will have your back.
While the first half of this list provides plenty of room to start driving a more defensible data infrastructure, it truly only scratches the surface. Continue reading in part two to learn five more critical aspects of a fully resilient data center and how you can start implementing these approaches now for more reliable business continuity.
If you’re already noticing areas where your infrastructure may need support, contact GDT. We’d love to help you with a no-cost Data Center Strategy Workshop to identify areas for remediation and help you draw up a plan for next steps.
