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 unprecedented

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

The consequences of any of these scenarios could be devastating. 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.

Defenders are seizing the power of AI as well, rapidly building an arsenal of AI-powered solutions to proactively safeguard data and ensure prompt threat detection and response. However, data centres face a dual challenge: as they adopt AI tools to strengthen cybersecurity, they must create policies and processes to ringfence those systems in order to keep both internal and outside threat actors from manipulating them. If security leaders of an organisation haven’ t yet begun to address this side of AI security, they should start considering it as soon as possible.

Active threats today

Human vulnerability remains the most significant threat to data centre security. Despite advanced technological defences, employees, contractors and other IT users remain susceptible to manipulation. Indeed, many unwittingly divulge passwords and sensitive information in response to phishing and social media campaigns.

In addition, data centres are prime targets for ransomware attacks, since they face immense pressure to restore operations as swiftly as possible.

Insider threats are another significant risk to data centres, including both malicious actors within the

Michael Paye, VP of Research and Development, Netwrix

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