Fortinet Blog | News and Threat Research

One thing that has become clear with modern cloud and data center technologies is the need for a different approach to security. An organization cannot rely on traditional infrastructure products to provide the level of security needed in the cloud or data center. Virtualization technology that forms the foundation of clouds and data centers requires special security safeguards to protect the data flowing through virtual machines. Once information is in the data center, new challenges around security emerge. Primary among these is the need to maintain control over data as it flows from virtual machine to virtual machine. Traditional hardware-based appliances have no control over the data once its in the cloud. Virtual machine security is required to inspect and protect the data in these virtualized environments. Data entering, leaving and moving within the data center should be subject to the same level of scrutiny as any other data entering or leaving the network. Critical network security technologies such as firewall, intrusion prevention, application control, and content filtering need to provide that level of scrutiny.

The additional challenge associated with securing data in the data center is that the security architecture must also secure the multi-tenant nature of the traffic. This means the security architecture must have the ability to enforce separate policies on traffic, depending on origin or destination. For example, information from the HR or Marketing departments may need to be kept separate from the Research & Development department. Regulatory and compliance issues can become more complicated as there may be no physical seperation of regulated information. The security technologies in place must have the ability to keep traffic entirely separate in order to avoid any risk of unauthorized access and regulatory non-compliance.

And, while all this is happening inside the consolidated data center or cloud environment, the need for perimeter protection becomes all the more important. With a consolidated data center, nearly all of an organization’s critical information may reside in one place. The perimeter security hardware must be able to handle the high performance and bandwidth requirements to protect information moving into and out of the data center.

Furthermore, both the physical and virtual security technologies must be managed jointly. One pane of glass management is required, with simple, comprehensive analysis and reporting.

To learn more about Data Center and Cloud security, attend Fortinet’s webinar on December 13. More information about this webinar along with registration instructions can be found here:

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