Data Leaks For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Protecting Your Data Center

In This Chapter

• Finding and dealing with unstructured data

• Controlling the availability of data

• Protecting your server infrastructure

• Intercepting denial-of-service attacks

• Deploying encryption

The data center is where your data lives — or at least where it should live. These days, the data center is usually a dedicated server (or array of servers and storage devices) that receives, stores, and makes available the data it receives from across the enterprise. As such it's an invaluable resource, and well worth protecting.

A central location for an entire organization's data may seem old-fashioned — wasn't it chucked it out the window along with the Open System years ago? — but these days it's actually underused. Although the overall amount of data is growing at disproportionate rates, only about 20 percent of this data is structured — generally that's the stuff that actually resides in the data center. Semi-structured data (like e-mail) can sometimes be captured within a data center, but often not. Unstructured data (usually documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, music, and pictures) is rarely captured.

Tip

Two things must happen before you can look realistically at managing data protection in your data center:

• You must have the data in the data center (not everywhere else).

• When you've got data control back, index everything.

There is a perfectly reasonable argument to suggest that in today's connected world we could actually keep everything we ...