siliconindia | | November 20188DCD is one of the world's leading manufacturing & engineering company which provides solutions in the sectors of the railways, mining & energy, defence and marine.By Nick Parfitt, Senior Global Research Analyst, DCD Grouphe threat to data centres takes two main forms - physical disrup-tion to the facility infrastructure and cybersecurity threats to the IT that it houses. In common with the changing profile of the data center, these threats are merg-ing - it would be possible, for example, to disrupt a data center's operations through infiltrating the IT that runs it. Greater attention is be-ing focused on security globally and in Asia. This is the consequence of data centres becoming more central to modern lifestyle and business and this trend will continue - think of what might hap-pen if the digital systems behind an autonomous vehicle or surgeries via robotics are compromised. The increased threat landscape is also a consequence of the growing and evolving network architectures which link data centres with each other and with customers and which have been a key to the development of cloud. Cyberattacks have be-come increasingly more sophisticated and targeted and include (among other things) the most common current security threats. The cyber level faced nowadays include: DDoS attacks, Web Application attacks such as SQL in-jection and cross-site scripting, Brute Force Attack, Ran-somware, DNS Infrastructure Attacks, Malware including Trojans, `viruses' and `worms', Phishing (illegitimate re-quests for information and passwords), Advanced persis-tent threats, Social media threats and many others. Like natural viruses that can adapt to anti-antibiotics, so do these threats can adapt to defences put-up against them.The growing connectivity between data centres globally also means that trying to distinguish between the threat levels in different markets or different areas of the world is more difficult - data traffic of whatever kind has little respect for national boundaries. Physical threats to data centres also have changed. As the trend has been away from housing data in enterprise data centers to larger colocation and data center services fa-cilities and to access services from cloud providers so there is now a generation of web scale and hyperscale data centres that are far larger, more open and more publicised than has been the case in the past. Security measures have been de-veloped to continue to protect these facilities both outside and inside, while remembering that security also needs to let-in people who are authorised to enter. How the security requirements and approach need to change to keep-up with the pace?The basic requirements of security both physical and log-ical remain unchanged - that is to challenge rather than accept and to do so 100 percent as far as is possible. The development of technological solutions per se does not guarantee security - deployment, agility, training, being proactive in establishing and revising security protocols mean that it is the operation that is critical. This is not new but there is now an increasing urgency to taking security measures. Security is thought about as facilities and systems are designed rather than being added on as an after-thought. Across the Asia Pacific (based on DCD's survey of 797 in-TTHE DATA CENTER THREAT LANDSCAPE IN ASIA & GLOBALLYIN MY OPINIONNick Parfitt
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