Your enterprise’s most valuable assets reside in your data center, including proprietary source code, intellectual property, and sensitive company and customer data. Your customers and employees trust you to maintain the confidentiality of their sensitive data and expect your data center to be always available because they expect their data to be always available. It’s important for the integrity and success of your business to implement a data center best practice security policy that safeguards your data and prevents successful attacks.

The following methods and recommendations provide a blueprint for planning, designing, and implementing a data center best practice security policy in a phased, prioritized manner. Creating a data center best practice security policy may be a daunting task if you try to implement every protection on every area of your network at one time. However, if you evaluate what is most important to protect and begin implementing your data center best practice security policy by defending your most valuable assets first, you can transition gradually to a security policy that allows you to safely enable applications, users, and content without taking undue risks.