User Manual

> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation
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u All of these technologies and environments are mentioned as part
of the process of MTDC digital transformation and they therefore will
be deployed across the multi-tenant data infrastructure portfolio.
This creates the potential for greater vulnerabilities across
the network as it presents more opportunities for attackers to
compromise a facility as its increased complexity and dispersion
creates a far wider attack surface. Data from IoT presents another
challenge as data must be protected by access controls and
monitored on a real-time basis in a situation where it may be
dicult to ensure the security of the end points and of the mission-
critical information that is stored within the IoT data set. There
will be a huge number of such endpoints within even a single
data center and their interconnection – the network foundation
of the IoT – will lead to a more complex and disparate network
architecture. As the equipment within the MTDC becomes
integrated, so the online threat to the security of physical
infrastructure begins to take a shape parallel to the cyber-threats
against the IT housed in the facility. The deployment of the internet
of things (IoT) will create a vast array of endpoints even within
a single multi-tenant data center. The interconnection of these
objects will result in exponentially more disparate and complex
network and fabric architectures.
It now widely accepted that security must be deployed throughout
an organisation’s whole data infrastructure, and out to the growing
number of endpoints that are connected to that infrastructure. This
needs to oer greater visibility into the network. Ideally, the role of
the MTDC within a wider data infrastructure needs to enable the use
of one set of security capabilities running across dierent the dierent
data infrastructure environments - public cloud, private cloud, within
the MTDC and within other on-prem or outsourced environments. A
large number of security protocols and administrations are complex
to manage, and this may restrict visibility and control across the entire
portfolio. This is important as one of the most major consequences
of digital transformation is the growth in hybrid environments, multi-
cloud and flexible provisioning.
Assessing the Threat and Reducing the Attack
Surface
Protection of the next-generation MTDC needs to work from the
basis of securing the network and with that, all that connected to
it. More than the traditional approaches, the MTDC provider needs
now to understand the security risks against the facility and then
implement specific measures to reduce or minimise unacceptable
levels of risk. This might include reducing the severity of the
consequences of an attack, reduce the probability of an attack
occurring, or reducing exposure to the attack.
The first priority is to reduce the ‘attack surface’, that is the various
places or vectors at which an unauthorised user or attacker could
get into a system or get data out. The ‘attack surface’ needs to be
looked at in terms of the network layer, the software layer (with a
particular focus on web applications) and the human/user layer.
There are many sources that indicate the user as the weakest line of
defense. This is true particularly of MTDCs where access needs to
be provided to clients on both a physical and cyber level and which
may therefore present duplicative attack surfaces.
The process of reducing the attack surface follows the inherent
security principle of keeping out threats while permitting authorized
access. This is most eective when using a least trust approach –
reducing the exposure of system targets, protecting the network
and getting visibility segment by segment, being stringent in the
issuing and enforcement of authorization and reducing where
possible the amount of data that needs to be processed or
transmitted by deploying software and procedures including that
of data curation which can be used to restrict the amount of data
vulnerable at an attack surface. Preliminary measure will include:
1. Trac segmentation as a means of filtering, analysing and
verifying network activity. This will reduce the potential attack
surface through introducing protections such as firewalls and switch
access control lists. Segmentation of a network can make it easier
to isolate and analyse trac patterns and as an aid to visibility but it
is not per se proactive in enforcing authorisation or the control of
privileged information or inspecting trac for threats.
2. Identifying the data and applications that need protection.
This means that an MTDC provider must gain visibility across their
entire network and everything on it, without compromising the day
to-day operation of the business. The transaction flows for these
applications must also be mapped so that segmentation gateways
can be deployed as appropriate and with the right application, user
and content policies.
3. Security must work across the multi-tenant data center so that
clients, both internal and external to the hosting organisations can
rest assured that their data and applications are safe. This means
a consistent and accurate security policy across heterogeneous
environments.
4. Advanced endpoint security solutions must be considered a
priority given the number of dierent IoT endpoints connected to
the network(s) within the MTDC, the vulnerability of these and the
mission critical nature of the equipment and systems operated using
the data generated.
5. Underlying and overlapping these measures is the need for
intelligent security, that can identify and block attacks in real time,
and then use the knowledge to inform and prevent future attacks.
6. Applications, and even workloads within applications, can be
segmented using a network-based approach.