Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information in Classic, Virtualized, and Cloud Environments, Second Edition

Chapter 14

Securing the Storage Infrastructure

Key Concepts

Storage Security Framework

The Risk Triad

Denial of Service

Security Domains

Information Rights Management

Access Control

Valuable information, including intellectual property, personal identities, and financial transactions, is routinely processed and stored in storage arrays, which are accessed through the network. As a result, storage is now more exposed to various security threats that can potentially damage business-critical data and disrupt critical services. Securing storage infrastructure has become an integral component of the storage management process in traditional and virtualized data centers. It is an intensive and necessary task, essential to managing and protecting vital information.

Storage security in a public cloud environment is more complex because organizations have less control over the shared IT infrastructure and security measures' enforcement. Further, multitenancy in a cloud environment enables resource sharing, including storage among multiple consumers. Such sharing might pose a threat of commingling data across tenants.

This chapter describes a framework for information security designed to mitigate security threats that may arise and to combat malicious attacks on the storage infrastructure. In addition, this chapter describes basic storage security implementations, such as the security architecture and protection mechanisms in FC-SAN, NAS, and IP-SAN. Further, this chapter describes the ...