What is a Cyber-Resilient Data Center?
Hybrid IT, Connectivity in Data Centers
We recently answered the question What is On-Demand Colocation to showcase a model where dedicated hardware and network infrastructure is more cloud-like in its deployment and consumption model. Today we answer What is a Cyber-Resilient Data Center and why it’s needed.
Today we stand at a confluence of two distributive forces. The first is the continued hybridization and diversification of enterprise IT – we’re running our IT estates in more locations, on more platforms and with more diversity of models than ever before. This is causing a belated but very necessary transformation in how we secure our mission-critical applications and business systems.
Reinventing and re-architecting for modern enterprise IT
Over the last twenty years, there has been one revolution after another, as we’ve reinvented and re-architected our IT to keep up with the dawn of the global Internet, the advent of pervasive wireless connectivity and the consequent transformation of our user base to a global, multi-device and multi-stakeholder community.
The first great revolution was to solve for availability. We needed our IT systems to have reliable network connectivity, uninterruptible power, and we needed the systems to work 24x7. Among the businesses and offerings that sprang up to meet these needs were the first wave of colocation providers, and the managed hosting industry, offering customers a well-connected, resilient infrastructure platform, and solutions to ensure service availability.
As IT continued to transform from basic web presence and back-office support to a strategic business driver, appetite for functionality grew ever more voracious, and the traditional model became less able to keep up. We saw profound transformations in agility and responsiveness, led by the revolution in virtualization that allowed us to provision systems with a keystroke instead of a screwdriver, and then with the public cloud, that took this power and industrialized it on a global scale.
Finally, we’ve seen massive achievements in scalability, as we layered automation on top of cloud, creating an API-driven IT where applications self-provision via platform-as-a-service frameworks, and with the dawn of hyper-converged infrastructure providing an underlying hardware model as flexible and scalable as the software it underpins.
Distributed and diverse IT
Today our IT is more distributed and diverse than ever. Enterprises are embracing a hybrid infrastructure, IT. Assets are off-premises, in colocation cages, on managed private clouds, or running in the public cloud. The hybrid model makes the data center truly the nexus of the cloud and enterprise IT. It’s taken just 20 years to thoroughly transform how we acquire, provision and manage IT.
But if we look at information security, which has traditionally been designed, planned and acquired almost in isolation from infrastructure and applications, we see a model that simply hasn’t kept up.
A hardware-centric appliance model in a software-defined world. A static security dependent on endless tables of firewall rules in a world of auto-scaling apps and roaming users.
The next great revolution must be in how we secure and protect our systems and applications. It’s essential that we evolve and integrate our security – the threats are too great and the opportunities too precious to risk.
What is a cyber-resilient data center?
IT security is still hardware-bound and based on the notion of a physical perimeter. The cyber-resilient data center combines a broad security point of view that includes the physical security of the data center combined with a platform-agnostic services available via a software control plane.
A cyber-resilient data center colocation provider establishes and enforces policies, practices and controls, with clear definitions of roles and responsibilities, along the entire spectrum of physical and virtual security. This more comprehensive line of attack helps you:
- Maximize uptime and availability of your IT infrastructure
- Ensure data, infrastructure and networks are protected
- Meet required compliance standards
Cyxtera: cyber-resilient data centers
Cyxtera is a new kind of data center company that sits at the nexus of enterprise IT and the cloud.
The last two decades have brought seismic changes to enterprise IT availability, agility and scalability, and the next era must be underpinned by a similar revolution in infrastructure security. As the complexity of the IT environment grows and threats to its security continue to multiply, it is more important than ever before that institutions – both in the public and private sectors – integrate security into their core infrastructure strategy. Cyxtera is the first company to provide that integrated solution to customers around the world.
Learn more about the secure data center.
Views and opinions expressed in our blog posts are those of the employees who made them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Company. A reader should not unduly rely on any statements made therein.
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