: What Is a Data Center Best Practice Security Policy?
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What Is a Data Center Best Practice Security Policy?

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What Is a Data Center Best Practice Security Policy?

Protect all north-south and east-west traffic flows and prevent attackers from getting into your data center and executing malware or exfiltrating data.
A data center best practice security policy protects your own company’s valuable data, protects the confidentiality of your customers, partners, and vendors, protects the integrity of your network and business operations as a whole, and helps ensure the constant availability of the network. It protects against attacks that originate outside or inside the network, along all attack vectors.
A data center best practice security policy protects four traffic flows (areas from which connections are initiated):
  1. Local user traffic flowing into the data center.
  2. Traffic flowing from the internet to the data center.
  3. Traffic flowing from the data center to the internet.
  4. Intra data center traffic flowing between servers or VMs, also known as east-west traffic.
A data center best practice security policy prevents attackers from gaining a foothold in your data center and prevents any attacker who manages to breach the data center from exfiltrating data or moving laterally within the network to compromise critical servers. It prevents both known and unknown threats by implementing security policy rules to achieve best-practice goals that are aligned with your business requirements. It:
  • Identifies applications regardless of port, protocol, or evasive technique, including by decrypting encrypted traffic.
  • Identifies and controls users regardless of IP address, location, or device.
  • Protects against known and unknown application-borne threats and vulnerabilities.
  • Detects abnormal behavior that may indicate an attack is in progress.
A data center best practice security policy also catches intruders when they violate a policy rule. Violating a rule stops the attack because the violation causes the next-generation firewall to deny access and logs the violation so you can investigate the issue and take appropriate action.