Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information

Chapter 15. Securing the Storage Infrastructure

KEY CONCEPTS

• Storage Security Framework

• The Risk Triad

• Denial of Service

• Security Domain

• Infrastructure Right Management

• Access Control

The Internet is a globally available medium for connecting personal computers, servers, networks, and storage, making it increasingly vulnerable to attacks. 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 networks has become an integral component of the storage management process. It is an intensive and necessary task, essential to managing and protecting vital information.

This chapter describes a framework for storage security that is 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 SAN, NAS, and IP-SAN.

Storage Security Framework

The basic security framework is built around the four primary services of security: accountability, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This framework incorporates all security measures required to mitigate threats to these four primary security attributes: ...