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Let's Get Physical: Securing Your Physical Network
By Michael Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-09-23
Often concerned about patching the latest Internet Explorer exploit, squashing the latest worm, or upgrading to utilize the newest encryption, we fail to concern ourselves with one of the most important, and easiest to secure, areas of our network: physical access.
Physical security is one of the most important aspects of our systems. Even novice to intermediate hackers can gain unauthorized access to our systems when having physical access. Despite this, it is still commonplace for server rooms to be unlocked and/or accessible by non-essential staff. By failing to keep your doors locked, you're simply allowing someone to circumvent the hours you've spent building firewalls, encryption systems, and other procedures to secure your network's data.
To go above and beyond simply locking the doors to your server room: log access to your physical network. Installing a key-card lock access system to your server rooms will allow you to do this. With this system in place, you automatically have a log of those people who had physical access to your network.
Another measure of physical security is your backups. Although a mountain of backup tapes in your office may look cool, it is not good practice. Failing to keep your backups under lock and key is worse practice than leaving your doors unlocked. It is much easier for someone to swipe a small backup tape and take it home unnoticed than for them to slip in and out unnoticed into a server room. Taking this idea a step further, you should be sure to encrypt your backups. Not only will this slow down experienced hackers, but also will make the disgruntled employee unable to easily gain access to sensitive data via a stolen backup. An even more likely scenario is if you are rotating backups to an off-site location for disaster plan purposes. Having your backup data encrypted for the backups in these transactions make it more difficult for random people, i.e. delivery personnel, receptionists, etc., to gain unauthorized access.
These few items are not an exhaustive list of what you should do to secure your physical network, but merely an insight to how important it is. Don't delay in evaluating your physical security and addressing any issues you may find.
About the Author:
Michael Marr is a IT staff Writer for WebProNews.
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