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> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation
25
The New Security Focus
The protection of the environments in an MTDC that are and will be
created as digitalization evolves will dier from the requirements of
protecting a legacy data center.
There are therefore a number of important considerations for
developing a security model in an MTDC:
• It needs to reflect the changing design and operation of a
multi-tenant facility and be designed for the mix of services
and environment oered by the facility (or facilities). While the
principles of security are general so their application to each
facility in terms of IT protection, OT protection and physical
measures will be dierent. There is no ‘one size fits all’.
• The measures taken must be able to adapt so that they provides
consistent, constant and intelligent protection across evolving
and hybrid data center models.
• They need to provide protection against advanced and evolving
threats.
• They will only be as strong as their weakest link therefore they
needs to observe principles of protection that use multiple levels
and back up, described variously as ‘end to end’, ‘layered’ or ‘zero
trust’ depending on the form of security.
While the focus of security has moved to cyber-threats based on
the changing profile of the data infrastructure landscape, other
sources of disruption should not be ignored. Hacking, malware and
threats delivered via social media have grown the most to 2015 in
terms of numbers while physical, environmental and disruptions
caused by error and ‘misuse’ have remained at a consistent level.
This cluster of threats remain at a level however where they cannot
be ignored.
Traditional approaches to network security were based on the
principle of an environment at the edge of the internet which
could be protected at the perimeter and not for environments that
incorporate a ‘hybrid’ and virtualized mix of devices, data centers,
clouds and applications. Traditional security approaches are
inadequate against the level of cyber security threat coming across
the evolving network. Of particular note is the threat posed by
attacks which sit ‘live’ within the perimeter for an average of more
than 200 days before being detected.
The cybersecurity risk to the service data center is accentuated
by the dependence on virtualisation, cloud computing and the
internet of things (IoT). One of the major opportunities presented
by digitalization within the MTDC environment is for the intelligent
automated management and control of data center OT. In line with
the ultimate focus of digitalization on customer delivery, this will
enable better provisioning, customization of services and more
user-based charging models.
In terms of both IT and OT, server virtualisation allows more
ecient management and control of workloads. Software defined
networking (SDN) oers the same benefit for the network via
application programming interfaces (APIs). Infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) enables easy provisioning and deployment of servers
and applications, while organisations embrace software as a service
(SaaS) in the cloud:
“The biggest trend we are seeing is the ability to move services to
SaaS delivery and this is typically our first option for a lot of small
systems deployment for specialist roles. We have moved email and
collaboration to SaaS delivery as this is more readily accessible to
more of our workforce.” [IT Services] u
Figure 15: Comparison of Security Requirements between a
Traditional and a Digitalized Environment
Security Requirement Traditional Digitalized
Overall Intention Prevention &
diagnosis
‘Real time’ threat
management, isolation
and elimination
Focus Securing the
perimeter to protect
established internal
network
Securing applications
and data inside network,
protection of lateral
spread of attacks if
perimeter is breached
Adaptability of Threat
Response
Pre-defined Automatic
Visibility of End Points Little/none Real time, continuous
monitoring and
diagnostics
Detection Signature-based
malware
As above using IoT
analytics
Integration Limited Sharing of information
Threat Response Slower Immediate/’live’
Provisioning Can be lengthy Immediate/as needed
Scalability Limited As needed
Establishment Tied to physical
devices, signature-
based, firewalls, IPS,
anti-virus software,
VLANs and server
zones. Policies need
to be changed by
human intervention
item by item.
Delivered digitally, instant
updates and policy
changes. Evolving use of
IoT + AI to automate this
process.
Figure 14: Growth of Threats to 2015 as % of All
(Representational only)
Source: Representational from Verizon
10%
0%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Hacking
Malware
Social
Error
Physical