How do you typically protect a special or expensive piece of jewelry? You may keep it in a bank locker or in an electronic safe in your home. You ensure there are multiple layers of protection in place such as using a safe that is not easily breakable, liftable and carriable; ensuring a password is needed to open the safe; and placing it in a secure location. You may even try to disguise the safe, so it cannot be easily recognized.
You may also frequently check whether your jewelry is intact, the safe is strong enough and the location of the safe is secure. To provide further protection, you may even put an alarm mechanism on the safe to alert you to wrong password or burglar attempts. You may also take it a step further and have the asset insured so that there are backup plans are in place.
People take all kinds of measures to protect their most valuable assets. Organizations should be doing the same thing to protect their data center systems, which are their most valuable assets. Their protection mechanisms can be categorized into five layers: physical, logical, network, application and information security.
Measures such as having a strong safe or strong entry doors are physical layer security methods. Requiring a strong password is a logical layer protection. Ensuring access restrictions are in place and deploying the asset in the safest place is analogous to access control lists applied at the network layer of protection. Measures to disguise the asset, such as encryption methods, exist at the application layer of protection. And having frequent checks and controls to ensure the safety of the asset, and exercising audits, are part of the information security layer of protection.
Editor’s note: For further insights on this topic, read Ravi Shankar Vemuri’s recent Journal article, “A Five-Layer View of Data Center Systems Security,” ISACA Journal, volume 2, 2022.
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