How To

Digital Infrastructure Security: The Complete Guide

As modern businesses come to terms with the vast volume of data and applications that they must manage in today’s environment of workload proliferation, digital transformation becomes the most natural path forward. Both big and small enterprises are investing in the establishment of digital infrastructure systems that allow them to deploy data and applications anywhere.

However, when operating in this complex digital frontier, organizations must establish a complete and comprehensive digital infrastructure security strategy.

Key Takeaways:

Security in a digital infrastructure setting refers to methods and tools that specifically protect cloud systems, virtual networks, and digital endpoints.
The benefit of digital security is in its unique ability to protect against malicious parties that aim to exploit the complexity of digital environments, but that complexity can also present challenges for the enterprise itself.
Building a bulletproof security strategy for digital infrastructure entails strong zero trust practices as well as strict adherence to compliance standards and technology integration best practices.

What is digital infrastructure security?

Infrastructure security refers to the practice of protecting IT systems and assets against both physical and cyber threats. These can include malicious attacks as well as accidents that compromise security due to human error or random events.

Digital infrastructure security is a growing branch of infrastructure security that specifically aims to protect systems such as cloud services, networks, and endpoints. The massive adoption of the cloud and industry-wide digital transformation trends are making the digital aspect of infrastructure the norm compared to more traditional practices.

One prediction from Gartner states that 30% of critical infrastructure organizations will experience an operating-impeding security breach by 2025. This forecast becomes all the more foreboding as organizations outgrow their physical infrastructure and adopt digital infrastructure without considering new security needs.

Enterprise leaders extending their operations across a vast cloud landscape must find ways to secure data and workloads within the digital realm where malicious individuals tend to play by different rules and with different tools. This comes down to building and maintaining strong digital infrastructure security at any scale.

What are the benefits and challenges of digital infrastructure security?

Technology, digital platforms, and data are all critical assets for modern enterprises, especially those inclined to adopt a data-driven or data-centric mindset. Strong security protects business interests by keeping sensitive data out of the reach of cybercriminals and minimizes financial loss and operational downtime when systems undergo an outage.

An ideal cloud security solution also brings the benefit of centralization. A centralized security measure is one that simplifies the process of monitoring and responding to threats through the use of a single control plane that reduces administration needs and improves overall reliability.

The challenge in ensuring digital infrastructure security is complexity. Modern datacenters both on-premises and in the cloud are extremely complex and only becoming more so with each passing year. This complexity creates vulnerabilities that malicious parties can exploit.

There is also the looming threat of more frequent cyber attacks. Not only are ransomware attacks and denial-of-service threats occurring more often, but the parties behind these attacks are growing more competent and their methods more sophisticated. IT security must keep pace with new developments in cybercrime in order to protect sensitive information.

How can companies build strong digital infrastructure security?

Organization-wide security always starts with the security policies and measures enforced by the organization itself. At the most basic level of digital infrastructure security, employees should protect their accounts with authentication mechanisms, like strong passwords multi-factor authentication (MFA) and train employees to use and update these mechanisms according to an enforceable set of guidelines.

The enterprise should take matters one step further by implementing a policy of “zero trust” at every level of the organization. Zero trust security refers to the mindset that any party attempting to access the company network, whether internal or external to the organization, could be a potential security threat and must authenticate to gain authorization regardless of their position in the business.

The next step is to ensure visibility and security across the various endpoints and clouds in the distributed network, as well as the visibility over the datacenter itself. The right cloud platform makes it possible to observe activity and performance from a single pane of glass, giving IT administrators the ability to perceive threats in real time.

Compliance is another variable to consider in building a digital infrastructure security strategy. Cloud-based data in the digital infrastructure must comply with industry encryption standards as well as other legally mandated standards for the good of the company’s finances and reputation as well as the security of data.

The integration of technology is a crucial final step in securing digital infrastructure. There are solutions for improving security at endpoints, servers, storage, and network levels separately, but keeping these various security solutions separate will only facilitate complexity and high costs. An integrated approach promotes simplicity, centralization, and cost-efficiency.

A cloud platform with digital infrastructure security at the core

A complete security solution is one that promotes centralization and simplicity while also enforcing visibility, compliance, and zero-trust policies. This should be a cloud platform that supports all of a business’s goals without compromising on accessibility or infrastructure resiliency.

Nutanix Cloud Platform is that solution. Nutanix Cloud Platform security provides native platform hardening, security auditing, and infrastructure-wide protection from network threats.

Today’s IT climate is one in which businesses must deploy data and apps across a wide variety of locations to stay competitive. With comprehensive digital infrastructure security in place, it is possible to place data and apps anywhere with the confidence that the underlying network will not lay exposed.

Learn more about enterprise data protection as well as how to more effectively manage risks in the datacenter.

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