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Josh Bosquez CTO of Armor Cloud Security got to talk about the state of data center cybersecurity in a recent HawkTalk conducted by David Liggitt from datacenterHawk.
This article is a general overview of the state of security in the industry, as well as the predictions that David and Josh talked about during the interview.
Data Center Security in the Distant and Recent Past
Josh is in a unique position to talk about cybersecurity for data centers. He cut his teeth in the Dallas telco industry in the late 1990s. Back then, the scene was all about the monitoring and empowering of data centers and creating new kinds of infrastructure automation. Later Josh and his team moved into the realm of compliance testing and automation. When the Cloud started to flourish, the focus became providing cybersecurity that could scale on demand. This is how he came to work with so many security oriented managed service providers (MSPs) in recent years.
Josh noted that back in the old days, security planning and the protection of physical space like a data center was relatively easy. You could see the cables and the hardware, and you knew how everything stacked. But in the Cloud, things are abstracted. Everything is hands off. New techniques needed to be learned in this virtual terrain. As more and more companies moved to full or hybrid Cloud, the security strategy became far more complicated. Technician training and certification needed to be ramped up, and some companies needed to entirely rewrite their cybersecurity playbook.
Data Center Security in 2021
Josh noted that as far as the most common things companies can do to protect themselves in 2021, there's no one silver bullet. But the most important thing is user education. If they don't know about ransomware, and phishing attempts, and what links are unsafe or unwise to click, about how IT support will actually contact them, and what questions they're allowed to ask... the user is a security liability. After education, the priorities are anti-virus, anti-spyware, and the like. But user education is number one in any case.
With remote work becoming a top priority, trying to protect users at home is a big challenge in some companies. They had set up a safe environment in the office, and then suddenly everyone was a telecommuter. The protection they set up in the past has to rapidly shift in order to cover this new paradigm.
He was asked to address what strategies companies providing data center services are using to protect themselves and their current customers. He said that these days, Armor standardizes around ways to gain full visibility into an environment. Every layer of the OSI model needs to be accounted for in some way, from physical data center access to network security, to access control, to hosts, and everything in between. To do this, a cybersecurity team needs to be able to see every asset out there, whether it's real or virtual. And the monitoring tools and reporting methods need to be understandable by experienced CISMs and relative laymen alike since you never know who you’re going to need to explain a security situation to get buy-in for critical systems.
A lot of organizations are leaning on security MSPs, simply because the budget for internal security has not changed over the years, while the complexity of the cybersecurity landscape has ramped up tremendously. So, they leverage the expertise of MSPs in the security compliance space even as they continue to build their own internal capabilities. Then they can use the monitoring, reporting, and automation tools that are provided by firms like Armor.
