What is the term generally used to describe data centres available to many users over the Internet?

A data center is a facility that centralizes an organization’s shared IT operations and equipment for the purposes of storing, processing, and disseminating data and applications. Because they house an organization's most critical and proprietary assets, data centers are vital to the continuity of daily operations. Consequently, the security and reliability of data centers and their information are among any organization’s top priorities.

In the past, data centers were highly controlled physical infrastructures, but the public cloud has since changed that model. Except where regulatory restrictions require an on-premises data center without internet connections, most modern data center infrastructures have evolved from on-premises physical servers to virtualized infrastructure that supports applications and workloads across multi-cloud environments.

The Role of the Data Center

Data centers are an integral part of the enterprise, designed to support business applications and provide services such as:

• Data storage, management, backup and recovery
• Productivity applications, such as email
• High-volume e-commerce transactions
• Powering online gaming communities
• Big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence

Today, there are reportedly more than 7 million data centers worldwide. Practically every business and government entity builds and maintains its own data center or has access to someone else's, if not both models. Many options are available today, such as renting servers at a colocation facility, using data center services managed by a third party, or using public cloud-based services from hosts like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony and Google.

The Core Components of a Data Center

Data center architectures and requirements can differ significantly. For example, a data center built for a cloud service provider like Amazon satisfies facility, infrastructure and security requirements that significantly differ from a completely private data center, such as one built for a government facility that is dedicated to securing classified data.

Regardless of classification, an effective data center operation is achieved through a balanced investment in the facility and the equipment it houses. In addition, since data centers often house an organization's business-critical data and applications, it's essential that both facility and equipment are secured against intruders and cyberattacks.

The primary elements of a data center break down as follows:

• Facility – the usable space available for IT equipment. Providing round-the-clock access to information makes data centers some of the world’s most energy-consuming facilities. Design to optimize space and environmental control to keep equipment within specific temperature/humidity ranges are both emphasized.
• Core components – equipment and software for IT operations and storage of data and applications. These may include storage systems; servers; network infrastructure, such as switches and routers; and various information security elements, such as firewalls.
• Support infrastructure – equipment contributing to securely sustaining the highest availability possible. The Uptime Institute has defined four tiers of data centers, with availability ranging from 99.671% to 99.995%. Some components for supporting infrastructure include:
  • Uninterruptible Power Sources (UPS) – battery banks, generators and redundant power sources.
  • Environmental control – computer room air conditioners (CRAC); heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems; and exhaust systems.
  • Physical security systems – biometrics and video surveillance systems.
• Operations staff – personnel available to monitor operations and maintain IT and infrastructure equipment around the clock.

Data centers have evolved significantly in recent years. As enterprise IT needs continue to move toward on-demand services, data center infrastructure has shifted from on-premises servers to virtualized infrastructure that supports workloads across pools of physical infrastructure and multi-cloud environments. There is an expression these days: The modern data center is where your workloads are.

Read Three Use Cases for Securing a Hybrid Data Center to learn more about the evolution of the data center as well as how to secure modern data centers and hybrid clouds.

Types Of Data Centers

Data centers vary in size, from a small server room all the way up to groups of geographically distributed buildings, but they all share one thing in common: they are a critical business asset where companies often invest in and deploy the latest advancements in data center networking, compute and storage technologies.

The modern data center has evolved from a facility containing an on-premises infrastructure to one that connects on-premises systems with cloud infrastructures where networks, applications and workloads are virtualized in multiple private and public clouds.

• Enterprise data centers are typically constructed and used by a single organization for their own internal purposes. These are common among tech giants.
• Colocation data centers function as a kind of rental property where the space and resources of a data center are made available to the people willing to rent it.
• Managed service data centers offer aspects such as data storage, computing, and other services as a third party, serving customers directly.
• Cloud data centers are distributed and are sometimes offered to customers with the help of a third-party managed service provider.

Evolution of the Data Center to the Cloud

The fact that virtual cloud DC can be provisioned or scaled-down with only a few clicks is a major reason for shifting to the cloud. In modern data centers, software-defined networking (SDN) manages the traffic flows via software. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings, hosted on private and public clouds, spin up whole systems on-demand. When new apps are needed, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and container technologies are available in an instant.

More companies are moving to the cloud, but it isn’t a leap that some are willing to take. In 2019, it was reported that enterprises paid more annually on cloud infrastructure services than they did on physical hardware for the first time. However, an Uptime Institute survey found that 58% of organizations say a lack of visibility, transparency, and accountability of public cloud services keeps most workloads in corporate data centers.

Data Center Architecture Components

Data centers are made up of three primary types of components: compute, storage, and network.  However, these components are only the top of the iceberg in a modern DC.  Beneath the surface, support infrastructure is essential to meeting the service level agreements of an enterprise data center.

Data Center Computing

Servers are the engines of the data center. On servers, the processing and memory used to run applications may be physical, virtualized, distributed across containers, or distributed among remote nodes in an edge computing model. Data centers must use processors that are best suited for the task, e.g. general purpose CPUs may not be the best choice to solve artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) problems.

Data Center Storage

Data centers host large quantities of sensitive information, both for their own purposes and the needs of their customers. Decreasing costs of storage media increases the amount of storage available for backing up the data either locally, remote, or both. Advancements in non-volatile storage media lowers data access times. In addition, as in any other thing that is software-defined, software-defined storage technologies increase staff efficiency for managing a storage system.

Data Center Networks

Datacenter network equipment includes cabling, switches, routers, and firewalls that connect servers together and to the outside world. Properly configured and structured, they can manage high volumes of traffic without compromising performance. A typical three-tier network topology is made up of core switches at the edge connecting the data center to the Internet and a middle aggregate layer that connects the core layer to the access layer where the servers reside. Advancements, such as hyperscale network security and software-defined networking, bring cloud-level agility and scalability to on-premises networks.

Data Center Support Infrastructure

Data centers are a critical asset that is protected with a robust and reliable support infrastructure made up of power subsystems, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), backup generators, ventilation and cooling equipment, fire suppression systems and building security systems.

Industry standards exist from organizations like the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the Uptime Institute to assist in the design, construction and maintenance of data center facilities. For instance, Uptime Institute defines these four tiers:

• Tier I: Basic capacity, must include a UPS.
• Tier II: Redundant capacity and adds redundant power and cooling.
• Tier III: Concurrently maintainable and ensures that any component can be taken out of service without affecting production.
• Tier IV: Fault tolerant, allowing any production capacity to be insulated from ANY type of failure.

Data Center Security

In addition to the building security systems supporting a data center facility discussed above, DC networks require a thorough zero trust analysis incorporated into any DC design. Data center firewalls, data access controls, IPS, WAF and their modern equivalent Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) systems need to be specified properly to ensure they scale as needed to meet the demands of data center networks.  In addition, if you’re choosing a data storage or cloud services provider, it’s important that you understand the security measures they use for their own DC. Invest in the highest possible level of security to keep your information safe.

Partnering with a data center security provider is a good way to accomplish these goals.  Check Point Maestro provides hyperscale security that scales on-demand to meet an organization’s data center security requirements.  To learn more, check out this ESG whitepaper.  Then, schedule a free demo of Maestro Hyperscale Network Security.

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