Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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Security concerns for storage
Until recently, security was rarely considered an issue in storage. Dedicated storage was secure by nature, and storage networks were mostly installed within the bounds of physically secure data centers. The issue hasn't been security, but ensuring data integrity and allocating storage. Even with the rapid growth of storage networks, security concerns have only increased incrementally, mostly to handle allocation of shared storage, which has been dealt with by implementing zoning and LUN access controls. Configuration control and keeping administrators from accidentally destroying data has been the main focus - as opposed to dealing with hostile threats and fears of the wrong people accessing or tampering with stored data.
Dan Tanner, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group, Boston, MA, says security is now becoming more important, "if transmission is beyond a data center or firewall."
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Another reason which is pushing security to the forefront is the issue of transferring data over public networks. As users start to expand data traffic beyond the data center, to remote locations and across wide geographic distances, security has become an important issue. Aberdeen's Tanner says, "When storage is networked, security becomes more important, especially if the network isn't contained within a secure data center." With the advent of IP-based storage networking, data is now readily accessible as it travels over unsecured IP infrastructure. The ever-present threats of hackers and issues with the fundamentally insecure nature of public networks has made security a top priority in these IP-enabled solutions.
In fact, even with safe internal networks behind a firewall, there's still a need for securing storage data. On public networks, "Everyone understands that SSL/TLS [Transport Layer Security is based on Secure Sockets Layer, a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of a message transmission on the Internet] is needed to protect passwords, credit card numbers and the like," says David Black, an architect at EMC and one of the contributors to the iSCSI spec. "The problem is with less-than-public networks - it's very easy to assume that the entire corporate LAN behind the firewall[s] is secure, and that's not only just plain wrong, but dangerously so."
Finally, vendors cite recent legislation such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), which mandates that certain industries must store and manage their data in a secure manner. These pieces of legislation require that these firms secure their data from unauthorized use or access to a much greater degree than they previously have been, including encryption on disk or tape and across network links.
Users' security concerns
The top threats to storage network security include modification, destruction or theft of data, denial of service or viruses, hacking - particularly through management interfaces such as Web interfaces and Telnet - and operator error/mistakes. However, depending on who you ask, some of these areas are more important than others.
Aside from the issues of preventing rogue or improperly configured servers from corrupting or accessing data in Fibre Channel (FC), security issues in storage networks in the data centers are mostly limited to access to Ethernet management ports. Roy Hall, director of storage engineering at GlaxoSmithKline points to hacking of management interfaces as the threat he worries most about. He says, "Some of our SAN management tools use Web interfaces, and thus are vulnerable in that they can be accessed via our LAN."
This was first published in September 2002
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