Three Best Practices to Avoid Cyberattacks

by Emerson Network Power on 8/19/15 8:49 AM

Cyber_Security

From major retail cyberattacks to Hollywood studio hackers, cybersecurity is now, more than ever, on the mind of every CIO in the world — and rightfully so. According to our recent article in Data Center Journal, the most common cause of a data breach is malicious or criminal attacks, which could end up costing not only nights of sleep for CIOs, but also millions of dollars; in some cases upwards of $5.4 million.

While these attacks can be devastating, there are some best practices to help avoid cyber-disaster:

1. Don’t give hackers a back doorIn order to prevent data breaches, consider isolating your network to avoid allowing easy access to your information. Since access can be logged through network isolation, unwanted activity can be monitored and flagged. To isolate your network and limit threats without compromising necessary access or performance, consider utilizing isolated out-of-band management networks. These networks provide full, real-time access without giving hackers back door entry.

2. Enforce the three A’sAuthentication, authorization and auditing are all critical to securing your network. Ensure your cybersecurity by using fine-grain user authentication through a centralized and controlled process, while still allowing easy access for administrators.

3. Ensure trust and best practices with outside vendors: Servicing data center equipment typically requires allowing atypical access to sensitive information about your data center with people outside your organization. Even new technologies are now requiring software updates while sharing IP addresses and network ports to accommodate those updates. While you may feel confident in your organization’s security practices, it’s also important you trust the security measures practiced by those outside parties or contractors, as well.

Security is a complex, never-ending process, but the right partners can help cut through that complexity and ensure your network—and your business—do not become the next victim.

What other best practices do you use to ensure your network is secure?

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Topics: Data Center, PUE, UPS, DCIM, monitoring, Trellis, the green grid, cybersecurity

How infrastructure monitoring can help increase data center efficiency and availability

by Emerson Network Power on 2/20/15 8:00 AM

Written By: Diego Chisena | Emerson Network Power
During the first decade of the 21st century, the data center emerged as a significant corporate asset, playing a vital role in business management and customer service. Throughout this period, the data center underwent an evolution as computing and data storage capacities increased significantly.

Data centers have traditionally been designed with extra headroom to accommodate growth, but during the last decade, demand escalated so quickly that added IT capacity consumed available headroom and outpaced supply in terms of floor space and power and cooling capacity. This created conflicts as facility personnel struggled to supply IT’s demand for server capacity.

 

These problems were further worsened by two trends that emerged in the second half of the decade.

1. The first trend is the increased focus on data center energy consumption. With both the density and quantity of servers rising, data center energy consumption became a significant factor in terms of IT cost management and, in some companies, response to concerns about global warming. Early efforts to reduce data center energy consumption focused on lowering costs around data center cooling, which accounts for approximately 35 percent of data center energy consumption.

2. The second trend was the adoption of virtualization technologies. In a recent survey of data center managers, virtualization adoption rates stood at 81 percent. This has created a dynamically changing application environment layered on an essentially static physical environment, increasing data center complexity and introducing new challenges to physical infrastructure management.

In most organizations, data center managers lacked the tools to effectively address these challenges. The network management systems essential to IT personnel in monitoring and managing IT equipment did not address the critical issues of energy consumption, available rack capacity, or ambient air temperatures that are essential to proactive data center management. Further, the building management systems used by facility personnel to monitor power and cooling in the data center failed to provide the alarm management capabilities required for critical systems and to account for the interdependencies between systems. Evolving from a reactive to a proactive approach to infrastructure monitoring requires a new type of management system that provides visibility into the data center’s physical infrastructure within both the IT and facility domains and across these two domains.

If you want to learn more, read the white paper.

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Topics: data center infrastructure, Data Center, data center design, data center energy, data center infrastructure management, DCIM, Trellis, the green grid, energy efficiency

Speed, Flexibility and the Data Center

by Emerson Network Power on 11/25/14 11:45 AM

Kollengode Anand | November 20, 2014 | Emerson Network Power

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It’s no longer enough to be dependable if you’re running a data center.  With greater demands being placed by customers, both external and internal, data center administrators are required to be both dependable and fast. Consider these facts, from our “State of the Data Center” report last year:

  • The equivalent of one of every nine persons on the planet uses Facebook.
  • We generated 1.6 trillion gigabytes of data last year. That’s enough data to give every single person on Earth eight 32-gigabyte iPhones, and it’s an increase of 60 percent in just two years.
  • Every hour, enough information is created to fill more than 46 million DVDs.
  • Global e-Commerce spending topped $1.25 trillion in 2013.

It’s always been important to respond to your customers, of course, but now there are more of them, demanding more information, and more quickly:  the report says that if the online video they are watching buffers for more than five seconds, 25 percent of viewers drop off.  And if the video buffers for more than 10 seconds, half of them are gone.

Oh, and did we mention that the average cost of a data center outage now runs more than $900,000…an increase of one-third in just two years?

Which is why it’s critical for administrators to be able to flexibly configure their data centers, and to be able to react rapidly when requirements change, or when there’s a problem.  We’ve found that a unified approach to the entire infrastructure is the best way of handling these situations.  Whether it’s heating and cooling, power, servers, software, or more, the ability to administer data center operations in a real-time manner has become more imperative than ever.

It’s one of the key elements in the development of the dynamic data center, and in being able to easily manage changes and maintain an optimal environment.

We’ll be at the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks, at booth #211, showing off the equipment and software that we’ve developed to help you make your business as dynamic as your data center.  We’ll also be speaking about where our clients believe the data center is headed more than ten years from now.   Their input has proven critical in the past, and their thinking is helping us develop the solutions that will solve their challenges both today and tomorrow.

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Topics: Emerson Network Power, Data Center, cloud computing, 7x24 exchange, Thermal Management, DCIM, Uptime, sustainability, clean energy, monitoring, Trellis

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