# What is Data Center Security?

> Data center security is the coordinated protection of the facilities, people, hardware, networks, storage, virtualization layers, management systems, and operational processes that host computing services.

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## Content

It applies to organization-owned sites, colocation facilities, and provider-operated infrastructure, with responsibilities divided according to ownership, contracts, service architecture, and access to each layer.

Protection combines physical and environmental safeguards with logical access control, secure configuration, monitoring, maintenance, data protection, and continuity engineering. Dependencies such as power, cooling, connectivity, fire suppression, personnel, and suppliers must be included in risk and resilience analysis even when they sit outside the organization’s direct control boundary.

### Key points

- **Protect the facility:** Record physical access, manage visitors and maintenance, secure racks and media, monitor environmental conditions, and coordinate utility and emergency procedures with life-safety requirements.
- **Protect systems and administration:** Inventory assets, isolate management paths, require strong administrative authentication, segment networks, harden and update platforms, protect firmware and credentials, encrypt sensitive data, and monitor control-plane activity.
- **Engineer recoverability:** Design appropriate redundancy, diversify critical dependencies where justified, protect backups, test restoration and failover, plan capacity and spare parts, and assign response authority across owners and providers.
- **Important limitation:** A secure facility or certified provider does not make hosted applications, identities, configurations, or data secure. Redundancy is not a backup, and shared infrastructure, control-plane compromise, customer mistakes, and correlated utility or supplier failures can cross designed boundaries.

### Related terms

[Cloud security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-security/>) · [Virtualization security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/virtualization-security/>) · [Network segmentation](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/network-segmentation/>) · [Data security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-security/>) · [Business continuity](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/business-continuity/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Release 5.2.0](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/53/r5/upd1/final) · [NIST SP 800-209, Security Guidelines for Storage Infrastructure](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/209/final) · [NIST IR 8320, Hardware-Enabled Security for Cloud and Edge Computing Use Cases](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8320/final)

## Attribution and scope

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