Opportunities in Data Centre Security

For years, enterprise IT organisations have been making major improvements in their data centre cost structures and operations. Many initiatives have been driven by the ever-growing demand for server and storage capacity, and the resulting escalation of hardware costs and operating expenses for electricity, floor space and administrative labour. Other initiatives focused on increasing IT’s enterprise-wide visibility and control in order to improve regulatory compliance and support security audits. To achieve their objectives, IT management has turned to techniques such as data centre site consolidation, and standardisation on fewer vendors, products and IT management tools. These tactics have had major impacts – and have generated clear ROI – for organisations that successfully executed them.

Securing the data centre against vulnerabilities and attacks has also grown in importance in the past several years. In fact, IT consolidation and virtualisation projects that don’t directly address security issues can result in weaker and less efficient data center protection. The challenge in adding a security component to an IT-oriented data center initiative is in finding a solution based on compatible technologies, with reliable protection optimised for data centre environments and efficient management tools designed for large, distributed enterprises.

Check Point offers enterprises a fully integrated data center security solution that provides the same types of cost, control, and compliance benefits as those achieved by IT-focused data center projects. Because the tools it uses to improve data centre security – centralisation, consolidation, virtualisation and standardisation – are the same as the tools used for many other IT projects, enterprises can magnify the effect and ROI of their data centre initiatives by adding Check Point data centre security to the plan.

Integrated security designed for data centers
A complete data centre security implementation includes four elements: multi-tiered, multi-domain central administration of all firewall, VPN and IPS gateways and policies in the enterprise, regardless of number or location; virtualisation of firewall, VPN and IPS gateways, as well as associated network equipment; consistent and automated logging, analysis and reporting of network and endpoint security events across the enterprise, with data provided by different types of network and security devices from multiple vendors; and data centre security consulting and deployment expertise provided by a certified and security-focused reseller partner or vendor.

Combining all four of these solution components delivers the greatest value to the enterprise. However, security managers can also deploy the technology modules in phases. It’s possible to achieve substantial operating and cost benefits from implementing only one or two solution components, so an organisation does not have to commit to a comprehensive rollout upfront.

Consolidated and centralised management
Some of the largest gains from data centre modernisation projects come from centralising the management of distributed IT resources. The situation is similar for Check Point data centre security. The centralised management component of the solution, provided by the Provider-1 management system, enables a core IT/security team to define and enforce firewall, VPN and integrated IPS policies or policy components for all their security gateways – physical or virtual, local or remote. Multi-domain administration ensures that the security policies, logs and databases for each organisationally distinct domain are completely isolated from every other domain, even when managed on shared central hardware.

Consolidated and virtualised hardware
With Check Point data centre security, virtualisation means running multiple instances of security gateways, switches or routers on a single piece of hardware, eliminating multiple physical devices. These virtual systems can be deployed transparently, which is why VPN-1 Power VSX – the virtualised security component of the Check Point solution – can replace existing security equipment with little or no reconfiguration of network topologies. The virtual security software uses advanced clustering technology to provide nonstop availability as well as the most efficient virtual security scalability available to data centres at multi-gigabit wire speeds of today’s networks.

Solution description
Check Point data centre security provides the same benefits that large enterprises are achieving with IT‑oriented data centre initiatives: cost and complexity reduction, better regulatory compliance and greater asset control.

Features
• Centralised, multi-domain security policy management
• Consolidated and virtualised security gateways and network devices
• Centralised security event logging, correlation, reporting and analysis
• Standardised, multi-tiered administration across security functions

Benefits
• Reduces security hardware and operating costs
• Increases IT control, visibility and ability to support audits
• Improves data centre security reliability, efficiency and policy consistency
• Cuts incident response times while improving regulatory compliance
• Protects against new threats through SmartDefense services