Stop treating your datacentre as if it were a laptop: Symantec

Speaking at the Symantec Symposium in Sydney today, the company’s information security practice manager Adrian Covich said that organisations are treating the security of their servers like laptops.

Despite servers residing in the datacentre and having vastly different security challenges, Covich said businesses protect them as if they were end points, like laptops, installing antivirus and data loss prevention packages and ignoring the fact that they are have different challenges.

“The datacentre is being targeted, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a big organisation or a small organisation. It’s where the treasure is, and you need to protect it.”

He said that many of the challenges, such as dealing with lost laptops or malicious USB sticks, simply don’t apply to servers in a datacentre, and it didn’t make sense to treat them that way.

Furthermore, he argued that of the data that is stolen from organisations each year, much of it isn’t from laptops. He pointed to the recent Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, which showed that 97 percent of data is actually from servers.

SOURCE: zdnet.com