Report: Designing a Robust Server Room Security Policy

This report focuses on designing a server room security policy, emphasizing the importance of physical and logical access controls. It begins with an introduction highlighting the need for stringent security measures in server rooms, often separate from general office equipment. The discussion section addresses potential threats, including temperature, humidity, motion, power interruptions, and theft. It outlines three policy guidelines for physical controls, such as surveillance systems, secure device management, and disk locks. Additionally, it details three guidelines for logical controls, including the use of Enterprise Storage Area Networks, backup mechanisms, and advanced security features like VPNs and firewalls. The report concludes by reiterating the critical nature of server room security and the need for administrative controls to protect network elements. References to relevant academic sources are also included.

Running head: DESIGNING SERVER ROOM SECURITY POLICY
Designing Server Room Security Policy
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1DESIGNING SERVER ROOM SECURITY POLICY
Table of Contents
1. Introduction..................................................................................................................................2
2. Discussion....................................................................................................................................2
3. Conclusion...................................................................................................................................4
References........................................................................................................................................5

2DESIGNING SERVER ROOM SECURITY POLICY
1. Introduction
The server rooms are often separated physically from the entire office equipment. This is
due to the reason that the security of the server room would mostly require much form of
adherence and more stringent rules in order to maintain the security levels for the organization
(Fuzi et al., 2014). Large and extend server rooms are mostly spread across different buildings,
which are also known as data centers. The report focuses over the security impacts that should be
developed for maintaining the physical and logical access controls.
2. Discussion
The most ideal threats that could adversely affect the servers and different other network
resources are:
1. Temperature – The most ideal that should be present within the environment of server
room is between 68 and 72 degrees. The amount of heat generated along with poor kind of
ventilation could dramatically push the temperature to much high amounts (Komninos et al.,
2014). The major effect might lead to degradation of network performance and might shut down
the server systems.
2. Humidity – High levels of humidity could be a factor for causing humidity within the
room that might in turn affect the hardware equipment. This could be a major factor for causing
short circuits.
3. Motion – Any form of unwanted movements in the form of vibrations could disrupt or
majorly damage the hardware drives (Ahmed & Hossain, 2014). It could also dislodge the circuit
boards and dislocate chips. Any form of vehicular traffic could also lead to vibrations if they
would be adjacent to the server rooms.

3DESIGNING SERVER ROOM SECURITY POLICY
4. Power Interruptions – Spikes, dips, brown outs and black outs could be considered as
a devastating factor for the servers and thus lead to negative form of network performance.
Regular form of power interruptions could lead to a negative factor towards the performance of
servers.
5. Theft and Tampering – The damage to server rooms could also be caused by visitors
and employees who might wander within the workplace or outside of the server room. Due to
high number of persons there might be a constant risk that the hardware might get tampered.
The three policy guidelines and procedures that could be defined for implementing and
maintaining physical controls and processes based on defending against threats are:
1. A surveillance systems should be set in proper place such as the use of CCTV cameras
and such devices, which could help in monitoring over the physical security over the hardware
servers (Johnson, 2014). They could also be fitted with motion detection technology that could
monitor if anyone would be moving around the room during unusual hours.
2. The laptops and other handheld computer devices should be properly locked and
protected with high securable passwords. Employees should only be permitted to work with
laptops only at their desks. The server room should also be locked and any unauthorized person
should not be allowed to enter into the room.
3. Disk Locks should be used in the server rooms based on preventing unauthorized
persons from stealing important data from the server room by logging in within the security of
the servers.
The three policy guidelines and procedures that could be defined for implementing and
maintaining logical controls and processes based on defending against threats are:

4DESIGNING SERVER ROOM SECURITY POLICY
1. There should be a use of Enterprise Storage Area Network based on storing critical
applications that would be running on different hardware server machines (Nunes et al., 2014).
This system should also support disk layout reconfiguration without the extreme need for
restarting the entire system.
2. A backup mechanism should be fitted within the laptops that are fitted within the
server room. The backup of important data should be kept in order to prevent any kind of
incident of loss.
3. Advanced state packets, virtual private network (VPN), inspection firewall and web
cache solution should be enabled within the server rooms (Wilson et al., 2014). This kind of
strategy would help in retrieving of static content from the cache of the computer.
3. Conclusion
Based on the discussion from the above report, it could be concluded the security and
privacy within the server rooms is a matter of high concern. Each company owns their personal
server room, which helps in maintaining the entire networking and other matters of the company.
Hence, the protection of the server room and the internal hardware resources is a matter of high
concern. These servers help in maintaining the connection of the entire company. Hence,
different modes of administrative controls should be put in place in order to protect the
networked elements.

5DESIGNING SERVER ROOM SECURITY POLICY
References
Ahmed, M., & Hossain, M. A. (2014). Cloud computing and security issues in the
cloud. International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications, 6(1), 25.
Fuzi, M. F. M., Jamaluddin, M. N. F., & Abdulah, M. S. N. (2014, August). Air ventilation
system for server room security using Arduino. In 2014 IEEE 5th Control and System
Graduate Research Colloquium (pp. 65-68). IEEE.
Johnson, R. (2014). Security policies and implementation issues. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Komninos, N., Philippou, E., & Pitsillides, A. (2014). Survey in smart grid and smart home
security: Issues, challenges and countermeasures. IEEE Communications Surveys &
Tutorials, 16(4), 1933-1954.
Nunes, B. A. A., Mendonca, M., Nguyen, X. N., Obraczka, K., & Turletti, T. (2014). A survey of
software-defined networking: Past, present, and future of programmable networks. IEEE
Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 16(3), 1617-1634.
Wilson, S., Pavlic, T. P., Kumar, G. P., Buffin, A., Pratt, S. C., & Berman, S. (2014). Design of
ant-inspired stochastic control policies for collective transport by robotic swarms. Swarm
Intelligence, 8(4), 303-327.