Cybersecurity and Risk Tips

Cybersecurity attackers are getting cleverer about getting around safeguards, and unfortunately, data center cybersecurity is often reactive and fails to meet actual security needs. By undertaking a data center design course, you can get up to speed on current cybersecurity best practices.

Cybersecurity framework can help data centers establish a solid base for cybersecurity planning. The most popular cybersecurity framework is the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework. A good data center design course will cover the issue in much more detail, but briefly, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework breaks security down into five functions:

Identify

The first stage of the NIST cybersecurity framework is to identify an organization's cybersecurity risks and then prioritize those risks based on the organization’s business needs and risk management strategy. This is a decision for senior management, and it should take into account the numerous security requirements for different systems and all types of data.

Protect

A data center design course will teach you that for every identified area of risk, the data center needs to have a set of corresponding controls in place. For example, if one of the biggest concerns is unauthorized users accessing critical systems, then those controls should include multi-factor authentication, key management systems, and behavioral analytics.

Detect, Respond, Recover

The last three areas of the NIST framework cover what to do in case a breach does occur. First, the organization needs to be able to detect that there's a problem. This is a key component of a data center design course. Next, the organization needs to be able to react in a way that contains potential damage.