Securing Storage Devices
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hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 18 today we are discussing about Securing the storage Devices There are a lot of ways to store data in your network and on your computers.In addition to your internal hard drive,most computers have the ability to use removable media as well.Removable media comes in many different formats.In the old days, we had our simple floppy disks.Then we moved up to CDs and then DVDs and those held a lot more information.Next, we had external hard drives that plug in through USB.And finally, we had USB thumb sticks which are very small but hold a ton of information.When you're placing your information onto one of these removable media formats or external devices,you have to make sure that it stays safe from prying eyes.We want to ensure confidentiality.To do this, we always want to encrypt our files.You can do this in one of two ways.On Windows 10, you can use BitLocker To Go which will allow you to encrypt files using a software encryption.Also, you could buy a USB thumb stick that already has hardware encryption built-in,something like an IronKey USB shown here.Some organizations are a little more paranoid though and they want to ensure that nothing gets out of their organization.And they also want to make sure that nothing gets into their organization.To do that, they've implemented removable media controls.These controls are technical limitations that are placed on a system in regards to the way the USB storage devices and other media can be accessed. For example, this can be done using technical controls inside your group policies by denying read access from USB drives or denying write access to a CD or DVD.In addition to these technical controls, you also need to consider which administrative controls such as policies you want to create and guide those technical controls that are going to be used inside your organization.In addition to external devices and removable media,we also can store our data on our networks and we might do something called a NAS.If we use a NAS, that's a Network Attached Storage device.These storage devices connect directly into your organization's network.They often look like a big rack of hard drives with a network cable coming out of the back of them.Most of the time,NAS systems are going to implement some form of a RAID array that gives you high availability.Because these devices need to be accessed at all times because they're acting as file servers for your organization,this high availability is important.Oftentimes, we'll take different NAS'and we'll connect them together into what's known as a Storage Area Network or a SAN.A SAN is a network designed specifically to perform block storage functions and it may consist of many NAS devices connected together.Now if you're using a single NAS device in your organization or at your home,there are three tips I want to give you to make sure that you secure it properly.First, always use data encryption.If your NAS supports full disk data encryption,you should turn it on and implement it.Second, you should always use proper authentication.These things are acting as file servers.You want to make sure that it asks for credentials such as a username and password and that is individualized to each user so no one is sharing access across the organization.The third thing is to make sure you're logging access to your NAS device.This way if something goes wrong,you can go back and figure out who was the last person who accessed the NAS?Who downloaded those hundred terabytes worth of files?And what may have gone wrong?These are important things to know and without logs,you won't be able to figure it out. And Thankyou bye-bye.....
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