Data Center Physical Security: 5 crucial tips

Securing data centers is not a child’s play, but are the IT professionals doing enough to secure the data centers. Looking into the soft security measures like enterprise security software may be the most important part of the process but the buck, in fact, does not stop there. There are also a bunch of security measures that may be deployed at a physical level for data center security. Take a look.

Picking the Right Spot for Construction Spot

The thumb rule is avoid building data centers in areas that are close to airports, chemical manufacturing units and power units. It is also advisable to avoid building them in earthquake zones. Ensure that you build the data center at least 20+ miles away from the main headquarters. Ideally, it needs to be 100 feet away from a traffic ridden road.

Pay Attention To Walls and Windows

Go for foot-thick concrete walls as provide protection against explosive devices and elements. You can line foot-thick concrete walls up with kevlar for added security. Avoid windows and if you think, the idea of a windowless workspace is too barbaric for the workforce, limit windows to the administrational office of the data center.

Install Fences and Use Landscaping

It’s necessary to have physical barriers around the data center and what can be a better physical barrier around a construction site than a good old fence? Trees and shrubs can help you hide the building from passing cars and act as a barrier. All this won’t just guard the data center against obstructive elements but also hide it from unwanted onlookers.

Keep a buffer zone around the site

When we say buffer we’re talking about 100 feet. The best way to do is to install crash proof barriers around the buffer zone radius. This, however, may not be necessary if you’ve already installed fences and used landscaping.

Those were the 5 ways to add physical security to your datacenter. If you manage to pull just these 5 things off, your datacenter will stay out of trouble. Additionally, you may also try limiting entry points, installing a sufficient number of CCTV cameras and installing fire doors in the right places and using them on an exit only basis.

Enterprise Firewall: Is One Enough?

Firewalls are installed on a network to ensure control on the incoming and outgoing traffic. They act as a door between secured and unsecured network and filter data based on a fixed set of rules. Usually they are a part of the antivirus software but for in depth security, companies prefer to combine different types of enterprise firewall, to ensure complete security.

Types of Firewall
Firewalls have been taking care of network security since 1980’s. Back then, they were simple packet filter systems that check the header of the incoming data for its details and accepted or rejected it based on the protocol. Firewalls are categorized based on the network they are protecting, interception point and the data form that is being intercepted. Currently, there are three types that cover almost all kinds of network security threats.

Network Layer Firewall or Packet Filters

Network layer firewalls work on the network and filter data based on the packets they arrive in. They can be both state full and stateless based on the fact whether they maintain or don’t maintain a state table of the network activity.

Application Layer Firewall
Application firewalls work on the application layer stack of TCP/IP. Thus, they can be set to inspect data flow from a particular application and scrutinize the traffic for any threats. This is an efficient option for enterprise security, with the only constraint being that application level checking ads to data transfer time.

Proxy Firewall

Proxy Firewalls use proxy servers as gateways between networks. These can be either hardware or software and are considered to be the most efficient firewall systems. Existence of a proxy server between an external and internal network makes tampering difficult. The system is so compound that even if one application is hacked, it is almost impossible to use simple hack codes to reach other internal application through it.

Conclusion
Firewalls are an essential security component when it comes to securing networks. Networks are a complicated system and protecting them from intrusion is a logically challenging task. There have been many efforts to pinpoint one particular system that can completely protect a network and it goes without saying that all the efforts have failed. 

A single firewall can never be enough against the ever growing threats on the internet. An enterprise firewall is a combination of different types of firewalls placed aptly on different levels of network, for complete protection.