Data centers globally are in a race to modernize infrastructure to meet workload demands introduced by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and other digital operations. This means upscaling to meet soaring energy, cooling, and water demands to ensure physical integrity of the environment, and overall data center uptime and data availability.
Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platforms are an indispensable tool in this race, providing a single-pane-of-glass view into the physical infrastructure supporting data centers. DCIM is at the heart of converged IT asset management and facility operations. It gathers telemetry from power distribution units (PDUs), uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), cooling systems, environmental sensors, network hardware, and physical security controls, and delivers operators a real-time operational view across all of these assets.
Data center cybersecurity teams are guided by the business need to ensure infrastructure is resilient to attacks. Outages are an intolerable risk for technology leaders, including chief information security officers (CISOs), chief information officers (CIOs), and chief operating officers (COOs); failing to meet uptime service-level agreements (SLAs) introduces financial, regulator, and reputation risks, in addition to the obvious impact on operations. Critical infrastructure organizations are increasingly dependent on data centers for shared infrastructure, data processing, and efficiencies that are not possible on-premesis.
DCIM is an important line of cybersecurity defense and overall risk reduction. The visibility these platforms have into assets enables mapping of potentially risky pathways, unauthorized access, in addition to monitoring physical controls, and providing reporting that helps demonstrate compliance with global regulations and industry standards.
The Evolution of DCIM as a Cyber-Physical Risk
DCIM platforms are essential tools that monitor operational performance of the digital and cyber-physical systems (CPS) assets that ensure data center uptime, reliability, and integrity. For example, DCIM and building management systems (BMS) now often share machine-to-machine communication and workloads. BMS oversees the operations and security of the broader physical infrastructure including lighting and elevators, and DCIM delivers visibility into how an outage in one segment of the data center infrastructure could cascade into other operations. They also now share risks introduced by connectivity and exposure to the public internet.
The integration of DCIM with AI analytics and cloud platforms has also added risk to the equation. It has removed a protective layer of isolation that DCIM historically enjoyed, exposing it to new DCIM cybersecurity risks that have been introduced as a result.
CISOs, security, and network operations inside the data center must understand these risks, starting with unauthorized access to DCIM interfaces. An attacker with access to a DCIM interface could learn invaluable sensitive information about data center operations, including facility layouts, power distribution, utilization, and configurations; a threat actor would have the same system visibility as an operator and understand which data center segments could cause the most disruption if compromised.
Malware—including ransomware—and state-sponsored malicious code such as wipers could also negatively impact data center availability and reliability. Disruptive attacks focus on operational continuity, and illicit DCIM access could enable code deployments that encrypt critical systems, or worse, wipe servers, switches, and other infrastructure at the kernel level, rendering them permanently inoperable.
Data centers outages may also impact supply chains if availability is disrupted. Software and firmware vulnerability and exposure management is especially critical in preserving supply chain dependencies. DCIM often relies on smart tools such as sensors, power distribution units, and other IoT assets that are considered legacy infrastructure. Some may not be supported with vendor updates or security fixes for software or firmware flaws. Natively, they may not support authentication, encryption, or secure remote access, leaving CISOs to rely on an array of compensating controls to ensure resilience and availability.
Practical Steps for Hardening Facilities to Achieve DCIM Resilience, Uptime
Achieving data center resilience is a combination of cyber and operational resilience. Here are some practical steps for achieving DCIM resilience:
Asset Management and Inventories
Up-to-date inventories of data center and facility assets are essential to secure DCIM environments and provide overall operational resilience. For comprehensive asset protection, it's essential that inventories include a running list of software and firmware versions, the protocols that enable machine-to-machine and user-to-machine communication, and connectivity to the internet.
Claroty’s visibility capabilities, enhanced by our AI-driven CPS Library, creates a single source of truth of asset information. Asset information is fragmented because of a lack of consistent identifiers provided by manufacturers. This is especially true in data center environments where power generation and distribution tools, and BMS are often legacy assets. Our AI-fueled approach, coupled with the Claroty Platform’s ability to provide deep visibility into assets—a complete classification where we collect everything from firmware versions and serial numbers of products down to the rack slot—is the building block of operational resilience within data centers.
Virtual Network Segmentation
DCIM provides the visibility and asset management necessary to develop resilience via network segmentation. The strategy should be one of isolation of sensitive network zones from the public internet and/or business networks in order to limit an attacker’s ability to burrow deeper onto the network. Organizations should view segmentation as a tool to force traffic through firewalls and security information and event management (SIEM) systems in order to block malicious traffic and log potentially illicit activity. Advanced segmentation programs may also involve microsegmentation where security tools are moved closer to workloads and applications, further isolating them from backend systems such as databases.
The Claroty Platform leverages its asset visibility capabilities to enable segmentation and other facets of network protection that focuses on eliminating entire classes of risk.
Continuous Threat Detection and Monitoring
Traditional IT security tools often fail to understand industrial and operational protocols used within DCIM ecosystems. Threat detection and monitoring capabilities must recognize unauthorized configuration changes, or unusual communication patterns before disruption occurs.
Built on deep operational technology (OT) and CPS protocol knowledge, and visibility into risk pathways between assets and the internet, the Claroty Platform delivers faster detection and response via integrations with existing security workflows. Our protocol knowledge and asset management capabilities also alert operators to potential CPS-related indicators of compromise.
Wrapping Up
The modern data center is no longer just a collection of servers and cooling systems. It is a tightly interconnected cyber-physical environment where operational resilience and cybersecurity are inseparable. DCIM provides the visibility and control framework necessary to maintain data center uptime, availability, and data integrity. For CISOs, protecting the data center now means protecting the operational infrastructure that keeps digital business running continuously.
