Data Centers – Powerhouses For Modern-Day Digitization

 

 

Data Center

We as a race have always strived to make our hardships easier. What we call inventions today are actually solutions to the hardships that were prominent some years ago. Today we are in the 21st century and have evolved from letters to e-mails, wired telephones to cellphones and much more. In this is pursuit of exploration, the world has been moving towards ‘Digitization’ rapidly.

Digitization has been a continuous process of evolvement and it continues to be so. We have been seeing, using, interacting with and promoting digitization directly or indirectly, day-in day-out in our lives. It is important to question where and how we are achieving this digitization. Where does the processing of data take place? How do we achieve this uninterrupted environment of digitization?

There are special environments that are built to achieve uninterrupted and high volume data processing. They are called ‘Data Centers’. The Data Centers have IT equipment like servers, storage and network to ensure processing and transmission of data. They have the capability to process and transmit enormous amounts of data. Be it 30 petabytes (3 x 10,00,000 GB) of data generated by ‘Large Hadron Collider’ or the data generated in ‘Space Mission to Mars’ or even as small as an image you just sent your friend. To sum it up, a Data Center is a place that runs round the clock and is responsible for all the digital equipment and services that you are using. This blog describes the systems that fuel the operations of the data center…

Now that we know what a Data Center is, let’s get familiar with the systems that power up the Data Center and make them sustainable. In IT industry, such Data Centers are often termed as Critical Systems, IT Infrastructure systems or Power and Cooling Systems.

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Colocation Benefits – A simplified solution

Colocation hosting services means locating your IT infrastructure to the third party data centers. The data centers which are highly reliable, secure and has fully equipped redundant infrastructure. Colocating your web servers to the data center is always a wise choice as it provides many benefits and secured  physical atmosphere to your server. Colocation web services offers all the added features and also secures the data from any natural calamity disasters. Colocation is a type of web hosting, whereby customers who have their own server can host it at a purpose built Data Center (or Colocation Center). Customers rent rack space where they keep their server, while maintaining control of it themselves.

There are numerous benefits which can be classified as follows:

Cost effective :

The colocation service is considered as one of the cost effective solutions for your servers to maintain. Basically you don’t need to build and maintain the in-house requirements that your server demands can cost you valuable capital in facilities, Internet connectivity and maintenance personnel. The colocation hosting providers has such kind of full facility available with their infrastructure.

Reliable Uptime :

Uptime is always a major concern for the server owners. With colocation facility one can be rest assured that his server is getting proper uptime. Within colocation facility everything is redundant so that if anything goes down the colocation customers server and network equipment will not even notice it as there are redundant systems in place that automatically replace those that went down. This may include the air conditioning systems, UPS (uninterruptible power systems), power generators, utility power, network routers, redundant Internet backbones with plenty of extra capacity, and redundant onsite network engineering staff.

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Planning For a DR Site?

 

Planning for a DR site?

A waiting inquiry in the brains of most CIOs while arranging a DR site (auxiliary site) is the thing that ought to be the perfect separation between their essential and optional destinations. An inquiry that deserves due diligence and thought, undoubtedly. My response to this inquiry is that ‘It Planning For a DR Site?‘. There is no hard and fast rule governing the distance between your primary and secondary (DR) data center site from the way that both these locales ought to be sufficiently far from each other. The reason – when some unanticipated debacle strikes the primary site, the secondary (DR) site ought to have the capacity to connect to and begin running so that there is no business interruption.

Both the destinations can’t be located near each other just on account of the way that a characteristic cataclysm or a man-made calamity ought not to have the capacity to influence both the locales. In any case, how far will be sufficiently far… Give me a number I can consider.

The outline beneath gives a genuinely smart thought about organizations arranging their DR locations in 2007 and 2010. An intriguing perception here is that somewhere around 2007 and 2010, review respondents reported shorter separations in the middle of the primary and secondary datacenter. In 2007, 22% of respondents reported that the separation between their essential datacenters and most distant backup datacenter was more prominent than 1,000 miles, while in 2010, just 12% claimed this distance. In 2013, 13% guaranteed that the distance between their primary datacenter and most remote backup datacenter was more noteworthy than 1,000 miles, a number same as the previous year.

So what do every one of these outcomes show? Is far away truly better? Not so much, consider the accompanying actualities:

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WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT BROKEN AUTHENTICATION AND SESSION BREACH?

As we are covering OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities,broken authentication is one of it. Broken Authentication itself suggests the breach in the authentication procedure of a web application. Session management is the rule which checks for the interactions amid a web application and end-users. A web session is actually a transactional chain of HTTP commands and responses made by the client to a server. HTTP/HTTPS is the protocol to communicate between the website and the browser.

So, in broken authentication, hackers find the exposures where the breach could be done to dodge or seize the authentication functions.

Following are the ways where the authentication breach could happen –

• Probable login credentials.
• Exposed session IDs in the URL (e.g., URL rewriting).
• Vulnerable session IDs to fixation attacks.
• Unprotected user authentication credentials.
• Session IDs, passwords, and other identifications sent over unprotected and unencrypted connections.
• Non-rotated or Unshuffled session IDs after successful login.
• Undestroyed or not invalidated session values after logout.

Such attacks aim to get access to more than one account and gain all the privileges of the user which is attacked. These privileges let the attacker do whatever he wants.

EXAMPLES OF AUTHENTICATION AND SESSION BREACHES

Example #1: Probable login credentials

It is a matter of common sense that you should not keep the values of usernames and passwords so easy that everyone can predict them. The credentials should not be the ones which are used very frequently. Attackers can get a hold of this with ease. You should always use strong credentials.

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Input Validation Errors: The Core of Website Security Evils

In the past few years with the rise of technological innovations, there has been an increase in the number and sophistication of security breaches. Poor input validation has turned out to be the root cause of these embarrassing data breaches reported in the last few years. While compiling the code, the developers create input fields for the users to enter whatever they wish. The website is secure until the unchecked input fields are not used for hacking.

Let’s see why input validation is crucial for website security

What Is Input Validation?

Websites processing input data from users or a wide range of systems should ensure that it is valid. Validation is carried on a variety of levels ranging from simply verifying the input types and lengths i.e. syntactic validation to ensuring the inserted values are valid in the application context i.e. semantic validation.

For websites, input validation is nothing but verifying the values inserted in the input field ensuring date, email address and other details inserted in the field are valid. This is the initial step for client-side validation performed directly in the browser and submitted values are verified on the server-side.

Input Validation is a commonly used method to check potentially dangerous inputs ensuring they are safe to be processed within the code. 

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