Security and Virtualization in the Data Center

Threats facing today IT security administrators have grown from the relatively trivial attempts to wreak havoc on networks into sophisticated attacks aimed at profit and the theft of sensitive corporate data. Implementation of robust data center security capabilities to safeguard sensitive mission-critical applications and data is a cornerstone in the effort to secure enterprise networks.

The data center security challenges does not stop there. New application rollouts, virtualization, and an increasingly transparent perimeter are converging to drive an evolution in the requirements for data center security architectures.

Application rollouts bring there own set of challenges for securing communications and applying security policy—couple this with a virtualized environment and the challenge of policy enforcement and visibility increases many times over.

Traditionally, the perimeter has been the proverbial shield to stop malicious and unwanted outside traffic from leaking into the Enteprise network. Creating a secure perimeter is still valid and essential in defending against attacks and providing traffic filtering. But the amount and type of traffic entering the enterprise network has increased and continues to do so. Extranet connections for business partners, vendor connections, supply chain transactions, and digital communications all required more openings to be created at the perimeter to allow communication. Permitting these business-driven openings creates greater opportunities for attack and elevates the risk to a network.

In addition, attack vectors have moved higher in the stack to subvert network protection and aim directly at applications. HTTP-, XML-, and SQL-based attacks are useful efforts for most attackers because these protocols are usually allowed to flow through the enterprise network and enter the intranet data center.

Virtualization is driving change in the way data centers are being architected. Server virtualization is becoming a prevalent tool for consolidation, power savings, and cost reduction. It is also creating new challenges for infrastructure and security teams to be able to provide consistent levels of isolation, monitoring, and policy enforcement-similar to what is available for physical servers and systems today.

Device virtualization is providing new design opportunities and options for creating flexible data center architectures. Features that provide control plane and data plane isolation are offering a multitude of design options for device placement, Layer-2 and Layer-3 designs, and service integration.

The data center provides the critical application services for business operations. New architectures that leverage device and server virtualization are enhancing the data center capabilities while increasing the availability of these services. Using careful planning and best practice techniques, integrating security with these next-generation architectures can support this effort—without creating a hindrance. By properly planning and leveraging these new capabilities, scalable security solutions can be leveraged to increase service availability and create a more secure environment for the critical information residing in the data center.

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