Q. I am evaluating server management solutions and want to ensure that the mechanism for managing my data within these products is secure. What sorts of questions should I ask regarding security when evaluating server management products?

A comprehensive server management platform (also known as a data-center automation platform) is responsible for managing the full life cycle of server and application infrastructure. This responsibility includes the following: provisioning the initial operating system and distributed applications; managing ongoing change related to the operating system, applications, patches and configurations; and maintaining consistency against server, security and application configuration policies.

Today, staff members organized into disparate operational groups, such as Windows, Unix, Security, etc., manage data centers manually, largely with a collection of vendor-specific tools and home-grown scripts. Collaboration between these groups is difficult due to the different toolsets they use and the varying security policies applied to each group. Introducing a data center automation platform for provisioning, change and compliance can tremendously improve productivity and configuration stability.

However, a data center automation platform can also be an entryway for hackers and malicious insiders to access and manipulate sensitive server data - and not just from the outside. While there has been tremendous focus on protecting the perimeter of data centers with security infrastructure such as firewalls, it is a well-known fact that insiders perpetrate 80% of security breaches.

In a data center, security is traditionally an "all or nothing" model. Users either have unnecessary privileges or insufficient access to servers; the trusted administrators often have full access to all servers, while support teams often have little or no access to appropriate servers. The result is that data center security consists of a hard outer shell with little internal structure. Implementing a data center automation platform will let you address many of the insider security issues that plague operations, from establishing the appropriate level of security access for all administrative personnel to ensuring that all communication related to administrative activity is encrypted and centrally logged. It is therefore imperative that IT managers carefully evaluate both the security architecture of a data-center automation platform and the benefits it offers for controlling insider security.