Category Archives: Data center security

A 3 Minute Guide To Understand Data Centres And Why Your Business Needs One

A 3 Minute Guide To Understand Data Centres

Look at Industries globally and you’ll find that they too have caught the novel Coronavirus – or at least its financial impact, with an estimated contraction of 5.2% in global GDP in 2020 according to Global Economic Prospects. The most affected industries include IT Services, Manufacturing, Travel & Tourism, Financial Services, Mining, and Construction, with declining rates of up to 23% between April and June 2020. The pandemic, on the other hand, gave a huge boost to internet services and digital transformation worldwide with a significant part of the industries and companies that have started working and collaborating from home.

With such a condition a demand for data centers has gone up as technologies working remotely are playing a crucial role in keeping companies functional in this pandemic. The emergence of a new business environment in the wake of COVID-19 boosted the cloud services and digitization as companies modernize their digital infrastructure with an improved way of working.

But what is a Data Center? A data center is a physical space where organizations can store their hyper-distributed data, within a safe and secure facility with dedicated and reliable power, and network transmission. Currently, large enterprises process millions of bytes of information every day – both in the form of structured and unstructured data, and need a partner to securely host them. Many firms also prefer to shift cloud-based applications to data centers, minimizing the cost of running an in-house server and its maintenance.

To meet the constant demand for instant access, data centers are expected to run 24/7, which needs real-time monitoring of infrastructure, equipment upgrades, power distribution, air handling, and much more. Better infrastructure protection necessitates both the provision of security from internal threats and data breach. To stop this data leak, data centers are adopting increased security at the infrastructure layer that gives a more fine-grained approach, along with greater agility and adaptation. Lookout for reasons why companies should choose the hyperscale data center services:

Higher Margins: Datacenter services allow enterprises to modify solutions to help them avail service efficiencies and scale costs. Datacenters provide companies with an optimum solution that requires fewer systems or less storage space for service users to achieve marginal growth.
Data Storage and Management: Data Centers always push their horizons of tangible capacity to meet present and future requirements of Data Security and Availability. With new ways of data management companies can leverage cloud storage capabilities that help them to maximize resources and covering ways to improve them.
Safety and Recovery: Quick disaster recovery in the shortest turnaround time plays a vital role in a data center environment. Along with the virtual security of the data, data center sketches a comprehensive plan on the infrastructure, potential threats, and asset for backup and recovery of your data.
Data Space Management: Maintaining a physical server is a burden on budget and manpower. Utilizing an off-site data center gives tremendous flexibility, to add selective space as needed, allowing businesses to pay for only space and resources when they need it.
Expert’s advice:It’s easier and agile when you let experts handle and monitor your company data. An expert at data center collect organizes and distributes your company data for agile and centralized data delivery and maintenance.

Considered a best-in-class hosting infrastructure and the first Rated 4 Datacenter in India, CtrlS chooses to take data center services an extra mile with:

Over 20,000 racks and 200MW of power spread across major Indian metro cities
World’s First LEED Platinum V4 O+M Certified that is planned for decades of operational sustainability at zero downtime for uninterrupted support to manage operations 24*7*365.
Solar based Hyperscale data centers for energy efficiency, reducing operational cost and carbon footprint
India’s only 100% Quake Proof setup for better disaster management.
Cloud hosting services, hyper-scale hosting, and auditing the datacenters as per established benchmarking.

The global Data Center Security market expects to scale at USD 20.19 million by 2023, at a CAGR of 14.70. Whereas Data Center Service market is expected to grow by USD 3.35 billion during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of over 15%. Data centers, now and in upcoming years will continue to play a vital role in the ingestion, computation, managed storage, and management of information. Experience how CtrlS datacenters provide businesses utmost security without interruption of mission-critical infrastructure with optimized cost.

Four-point guide on why should you know your data center

A document, an image and a video, everything is a form of data.

McKinsey’s report on data describes it as an asset beyond our imagination. Indeed. The humongous data that surrounds us are key to fuelling business growth.

More the data, more the concern and trust factors. Unfortunately, the current wfh scenario has made data more vulnerable to theft and cyberattacks than ever. The most critical asset can only be protected by a secure data centre. Yet, the growing demand for data centers poses a question.

You are entrusting your mission-critical systems and asset with an unknown service provider. How well do you know them? Or do you know your data center at all?

Let us help with the four-point guide.

1. Type of data centre
Data centers could be off or on-premise. Cloud data centres are off-premise locations where data is hosted on any of the public cloud or on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or IBM Cloud.

Enterprise data centers, Managed services data centers and colocation data centers are on-premise where data is stored in a physical location.

Enterprise data centers are owned by an enterprise and are built within the dedicated campuses. On the other hand, managed service data centers are managed by a third-party service provider which rent or lease the storage infrastructure from the owners. The fourth type is called Colocation data centers where infrastructure is shared by multiple parties. Hosting, security facilities, speed, and firewalls are shared between the occupants.

2. Physical location
The physical location of data centres is of utmost importance to data management and security.

The best services have facilities for in-country or local data centres where implementation becomes seamless. Single data centres are prone to risks. Security, bandwidth, speed and risk mitigation becomes critical in such an environment. Also, the intended customer experience cannot be yielded by single data centre solutions.

3. Infrastructure facility and certification
A data centre must adhere to standard ANSI/TIA-942 certification to ensure compliance and is vital in protecting the hosted systems.

Based on infrastructure complexity and redundancy, data centers are classified into four; tier1, tier2, tier3 and tier4.

The most basic of all is tier 1 which is designed for small businesses. With a single path of power and cooling and minimal or no redundant components, tier 1 has an uptime of 99.671%.

Tier 2 data center offers an uptime of 99. 741% with redundant components including USP systems and generators for cooling. Tier 3 is designed for enterprises which require high security and seamless end-user experience. 99.982% uptime and multiple distribution paths ensure seamless data access and management.

Tier 4 or the most secure infrastructure ensures total protection from data theft and mismanagement. It offers round the clock monitoring without disruption with 99.995% uptime.

4. Credibility & Expertise
If all the above points are convincing enough, credibility and expertise of the service provider must be the deciding factors for choosing a data centre.

How reliable is the service provider to protect and safeguard your data?. Do they have proven experience? How much have they delivered and how much have they helped their clients are needed to build trust.

CtrlS being India’s only Rated 4 data centre has always ensured to surpass client expectations. Our Hyperscale data centers assure uninterrupted power supply, 100% network availability, ISO 27001 and 20000-1 certified security policies, 99.995% uptime with scalability on-demand and faster completion.

Does your data center have the same to offer?
Get in touch. Our experts are ever ready to help you provide the best suitable data centre solution.

Datacenters In Global Pandemic – Defining New Strategy & Redefining Operations To Maintain Availability

Datacenters In Global Pandemic - Defining New Strategy & Redefining Operations To Maintain Availability

After months and multiple phases of lockdown, businesses across every geography are grappling with the new normal and re-opening of office space. Yet, a recent report by Bitglass points out that the majority of employees and leaders in the US and EU continue to root for work from home (about 84%). But are businesses ready with the secure access and infrastructure for remote working?

With the start of lockdown, IT has been trailblazing the world of collaboration, striving to make its entire breadth of services available for the remote workforce, spread around the globe. With the possible continuation of remote work for many, companies will continue establishing new practices and tools to upend the pre-existing IT infrastructure.

However, not everything can be “Remoted” – especially mission-critical facilities like Data Centers.
Besides the given factor of their non-transferrable infra support like power-grid access, security protocols, backups, etc., one has to consider the sheer volume of highly complex workloads managed by such facilities. But, given the surge in remote work, every byte of organizational data must be managed and secured, now more than ever before.

So, what are Datacenter Providers upto?

First priority, which by now has translated to an established SOP for most, has been to re-examine data center operation strategy from the purview of COVID-19.
The second and current priority is rebalancing Hyperscale data center services, ensuring uninterrupted access, and how the services continue to evolve as the pandemic progresses.

How CtrlS, India’s leading Rated4 Data Center provider is addressing these –

1 – COVID-19 data center operation strategy

Disruption in IT operations was the reality during the first wave of lockdown. Quick-action to maintain uptime and client business continuity, and parallel ensuring on-prem staff safety, was the need of the hour.

To ensure safety and maintain social distancing norms, about 67% of the CtrlS workforce was sent home for remote functioning, as 33% (those in charge of mission-critical IT assists) remained at the facilities, under rigorous safety protocols. Every entry-point hosted no-contact temperature scanning and isolation areas, with employees screened for body temperature and other symptoms.

Today, the same continues as SOP, with masks, gloves, and PPE suits provisioned for everyone working in datacenters. Teams are provided dedicated operational cabins for social distancing and announcements over PA systems for limited face-to-face interactions. Besides these, clear demarkations in public areas for social distancing and frequent sanitization are commonplace. CtrlS continues to collaborate with certified medical experts who conduct virtual training sessions for COVID-19 awareness – mandatory for every employee on the field.

Technology was another route to mitigate disruptions, with the use of AI-driven predictive analytics for better asset management and remote infrastructure-monitoring to automate fault resolutions.

2 – Rebalancing data center services

COVID-19 has forced the world and businesses to adapt fast, with people adjusting to new work paradigms. The outcome – spiking internet traffic and increasing data exchanges over applications. CtrlS has incorporated edge computing capacity in data centers to meet these shifting demands.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, CtrlS has strengthened its existing infrastructure with better capacity management. This has been effected with efficient management of power, network bandwidth, etc. CtrlS has set up near-site solar plants for DC consumption, parallelly ensuring zero carbon emission and continuous power availability. Besides 100% uptime, this has eliminated any dependency on unreliable shared power grids, allowing to scale datacenter service. The result – a significant reduction in energy bill – saving costs for customers, and no-downtime, avoiding possible business risks in this already volatile business environment.

Summing it up…

With COVID-19, multiple social, economic, and business operation changes will be permanent. This is an indication that the next phase of managing and providing data center resources is about scaling mission-critical infrastructure to ensure client business continuity. Stakeholders at CtrlS are mapping this out, with planned expansions of DC space and Edge Datacenters – for the new normal post COVID era.

Data Center Security Strategies

Information security has always been a baffling area for security experts as they attempt to protect the infrastructure and systems from hackers and accidental users. In the increasing threat landscape it becomes vital to protect information assets but information security is unable to cope with the speed of business and IT deployments. In such scenarios traditional security measures are no longer effective while trying to address threats aimed at the insides of dynamic computing environments such as data centers.

The increasing demands of outsourced IT services such as virtualization, cloud models, storage, etc., availed from data centers is fuelling the need for comprehensive security strategies to protect critical data and systems. IT experts raise concerns that information security is unable to cope with the speed of business and IT deployments. Traditional security approaches focus on anti-virus software, firewalls, ports, subnets and network parameters and focus on preventing rogue packets at the periphery of the network. If case of a breach, the attacker has complete access to all systems and data in the network. Further perimeter defense fails to prevent internal threats.

The changing threat landscape with new types of malware, Trojans and worms is driving the need for more robust strategies to protect data and information assets in data centers. SANS Institute in October 2015 did an analyst survey named SANS Dynamic Data Center Survey involving 430 IT security professionals. The survey findings indicate that 37% of respondents have experienced attacks on workloads in their data center or cloud environment. On the whole, 44% of respondents have lost critical data and 55% respondents are unhappy with existing attack prevention and recovery times. These data suggest that security strategies should be aimed at protecting all the components in an enterprise IT environment to effectively manage and minimize weaknesses and vulnerabilities that expose organizations to risk.

There is a need for in-depth defense for the network, servers and end-points and applications along with additional layers of security operations for infrastructure protection. Such robust and comprehensive attack prevention schemes can ensure IT security to protect data assets and systems in dynamic computing environments. Some of the security strategies to consider in an ever increasing demand for IT services are given below.

Strategy for Data Center Deployments: Data centers due to their less complexity, flexibility and scalability offer on demand services to meet business needs. The recent increased demand for hybrid data center deployments proves that IT plays the strategic role of business enabler in India (Express Computer, March 2015). In such scenarios, the security strategies that offer trust boundaries must be replaced with trust zones, across physical, logical, virtual and cloud environments. The best approach would be to eliminate inconsistent policies in the data center and provide a single focal point for managing security policies across all physical and virtual instances. At the tactical level, the security policies must be applied to be aware of the context, identity and applications. All data at rest and in motion must be secured between the data center and the enterprise organization.
Security is ramped up at the Architectural level: In this strategy, datacenters in order to have highest availability and integrity must implement security controls as part of data center architecture. The security control must be optimized for each component or module – servers, network, storage and data and so on. Security is a continuous process and therefore, enterprise wide risk assessment with real-time visibility is very crucial in prioritizing enterprise security and protection. Real time protection is the key to identify assets that are risky and critical across all components in the data center. Workloads must be secure to detect system level changes across remote locations to assure data migration between workloads is safe. It is important to secure virtual desktop infrastructure along with VM traffic and also the server resource utilization.
Security is ubiquitous: Security policies must be ubiquitously managed to ensure efficient risk and compliance management. Datacenter operations will be efficient only when workloads, servers, storage, networks and applications are secure in physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Security deployments must comply with standards such as HIPAA, PCI, etc., and must provide real-time insight across data, applications, servers, networks and endpoints. Security strategies must be able to deliver end-to-end assurance, from the perimeter to the core of the data center.

While developing and implementing comprehensive security measures, in-depth security implementations in data centers are the key to optimize business critical services and availability. Corresponding SLAs must be ensured for maximizing resiliency and minimizing downtime. As data centers are becoming dynamic to provide hybrid services that are ubiquitous, risk and compliance requirements are highly important.