F E A T U R E
CYBER-RESILIENT DATA CENTRES: EVOLVING THREATS AND SOLUTIONS TO CONTAIN THEM
Michael Paye, VP of Research and Development, Netwrix, says securing a modern data centre involves significantly higher stakes and complexity than organisations have faced before. he world is seeing an
T unprecedented boom in data centre construction, due to factors like increased reliance on cloud computing and especially the rise of Generative AI. These data centres store, process and manage the vast amounts of data that power essential business processes, from product development and client transactions to financial planning and compliance reporting.
Accordingly, organisations need their data centres to operate reliably and without interruption. Suppose a DDoS attack overwhelmed an organisational data centre’ s network, rendering many of its hosted websites and applications useless. Now imagine if a ransomware attack locked down the data centre of a major cloud service provider that an organisation relies upon, or if an edge data centre supporting smart grid operations suddenly lost connectivity. The consequences of any of these scenarios could be devastating.
Evolving threat landscape
The core technologies used to power data centres are not new, so adversaries have no need to invent entirely new attack vectors to compromise them. Whether they’ re targeting a small business or a massive data centre, attackers can still rely on tried-and-true exploits, like human errors and misconfiguration. The key difference with modern data centres lies in the significantly higher stakes of a breach, because of the massive volumes of data that they now host.
The revolutionary AI technology fuelling additional data centre expansion is simultaneously supercharging the cyberattacks on those same data centres. Malicious actors are now harnessing AI to enhance the potency of ransomware and DDoS attacks, as well as to craft highly personalised phishing and social engineering attacks with unprecedented customisation, precision and sophistication.
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