Why Firewalls Are No Longer Enough

Very few organizations would argue against the idea that data center security needs to be at least as sophisticated as any potential threats it might encounter. And yet, in the event of a successful breach or attack, many victimized companies would immediately question why their firewalls were unable to protect them.

This sort of reaction not only highlights the flawed thinking behind many organizations’ current approach to security, but it also shines a spotlight on one major weakness of modern data centers: While tremendous effort, resources, and technology are applied to securing the perimeter of the data center, very little thought or effort is dedicated to security inside the data center. To re-state this in more practical terms: Once perimeter firewalls are breached, malicious attacks are generally able to propagate laterally inside the data center with essentially no security controls in place to stop them.

If the increasing frequency and severity of attacks worldwide is any indication, now is the time for organizations of all sizes, and across all industries, to rethink their current approach to data center security, and to meet today’s sophisticated security threats head-on with equally sophisticated strategies and defenses.