SECURING FIBRE CHANNEL FABRICS - Brocade

Introduction1As today’s IT organizations face more and greater security threats witha growing number of industry and government regulations, securingSAN environments has become an increasingly important aspect ofoverall data security. This is especially the case as storage area networkscontinue to grow in size and extend across multiple sites. A keyfactor in security is that many SANs use protocols other than the FibreChannel (FC), with many different protocols now carrying storage traffic.Some are upper-level protocols (such as FICON in the mainframeworld) while others run over IP (such as Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) fortunneling FC between sites and iSCSI for fanning out to low-cost servers).The introduction of FC over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol based on theData Centre Bridging standard, also introduces new security concernsin the SAN.At a very basic level, security measures need to balance the probabilityof a threat occurring, the impact of a security breach, the cost of implementingcountermeasures, and the value of the assets. The toleratedrisk level varies significantly from one organization to another anddepends on several factors. It is often dictated by government legislationand industry standards targeted at specific verticals, such as:• Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) for the financial and insuranceindustries• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelinesfor the healthcare industry and the HITECH Act of 2009• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) for companiesdealing with large volumes of credit card transactionsOther countries also regulate the privacy of information, such as:• Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic DocumentsAct (PIPEDA)Securing Fibre Channel Fabrics 1