Data Migration: A Golden Opportunity for Hackers

Note: October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. While we read a lot about hackers breaking into networks to steal data, it’s also important to remember that data is at risk when it moves out of the network — that is, during a data migration across data centers.

When large amounts of data move, so do hackers. Data migration is a golden opportunity for criminals to access massive amounts of data. Think about it: most of the time, only a small subset of enterprise data might be traveling over the Internet; for example, during a data backup to the cloud. But with a complete data center-to-data center migration, everything is potentially exposed. If the proper precautions aren’t in place — and many times, they’re not — hackers can have a field day with your data.

At Cirrus Data Solutions, we take security very seriously. In fact, you could say it’s in our DNA: our CTO was the former head of security products for a well-known software company, and he holds 28 patents, many of them around security. Under his guidance, our software design engineers made sure that our Data Migration Server had the best built-in security in the industry, including Triple DES encryption, key-based authentication, role-based access, and stringent password protection. On top of that, we can ship data on heavily encrypted, temporary storage devices so that enterprises don’t have to expose all of their data to the Internet (or use up their network bandwidth doing it). Given that massive data movement can be a red flag to hackers, the physical shipment option can be an effective way to keep your data on the down-low.

Compare our approach to what most data migration appliances do about security… nothing. They tend to focus only on the migration aspect and leave security to someone else, which means that enterprises have to buy additional boxes to encrypt the data prior to transmitting off site. That costs money and requires security expertise that some enterprises simply don’t have, so they end up bypassing the extra security step and crossing their fingers in the hope that their data doesn’t also cross the path of hackers on its journey over the WAN.

Given that stolen data — and particularly confidential customer data—is a valuable commodity in the black market, enterprises need to treat their data accordingly. A bank, for example, wouldn’t consider moving money from one location to another over a public subway; they have armored cars for that. Moving data from one data center to another warrants the same security considerations. It needs to be armored — i.e., encrypted, protected — and secure from point A to point B. Anything less than that, and your data migration is a risky move.