HARDENING THE EDGE

PHYSICAL SECURITY AT DATA CENTERS IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS ITS VIRTUAL COUNTERPART

- WRITTEN BY:DAMIEN MARTIN

In the cyber world, security is constantly at the forefront.

Companies train their employees on how to recognize phishing attempts, they buy software that protects their networks, they take a zero trust approach to sensitive data. But what often goes undiscussed is that there are vulnerabilities in the physical world as well as the virtual one. Any of that data that's on the cloud or on the edge is stored on servers in a data center. Though you might never set foot there or even know where it is, that data center is in a physical place, and keeping it secure is a big deal for businesses.

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Data centers aren’t just rows of servers sitting by themselves. People work there. Depending on the data center, there can be engineers, administrators, support staff, and designers. Vendors and technicians can be going in and out constantly. Simply put, there are a lot of people coming through, and they all need to be vetted. Whether ill-intentioned or not, each person coming in and out poses an insider threat. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report shows that nearly 70% of data breaches involved a “non-malicious human element, like a person falling victim to a social engineering attack or making an error.”

With so much activity during the day and valuable equipment in often isolated areas at night, data centers need adequate fencing and barriers so that all visitors are routed to secure entry points and that trespassers face lots of obstacles to unauthorized entry. They need security guards, but with more than 5,000 data centers in the U.S. and security agencies already at low staffing levels, there might not be enough to go around.