Configuration Management Security in Data Center Environments

Modern data centers need to manage complex, multi-level hardware and software infrastructures in order to provide a wide array of services flexibly and reliably. The emerging trends of virtualization and outsourcing further increase the scale and complexity of this management. In this chapter, we focus on the configuration management issues and expose a variety of attack and misconfiguration scenarios, and discuss some approaches to making configuration management more robust. We also discuss a number of challenges in identifying the vulnerabilities in configurations, handling configuration management in the emerging cloud computing environments, and in hardening the configurations against hacker attacks.