Secure data center networking
Fortify, validate and drive trust into data center networking infrastructures
Nokia secure data center networking offers a transformative vision for protecting data centers against new and emerging threats. It combines our proven security innovations and expertise to help organizations build resilient, adaptive networks that proactively neutralize threats and safeguard critical services.
Why do organizations need strong data center network security?
Strong data center network security is a must in an era dominated by AI workloads, cloud migrations and sophisticated cyber threats. Today’s data center networks provide high-performance IP and optical interconnectivity on a large scale, but they have critical security gaps that put organizations and their data at risk.
Organizations can’t defend against modern threats or modern compliance regulations with legacy security approaches. It’s time to implement proactive, integrated security strategies that can use segmentation, zero-trust models and automation to fortify cyber defenses, verify traffic in real time and ensure that everyone can trust the data center network.
The consequences of successful attacks on data center networks will become greater as organizations and their customers increase their reliance on AI, distributed workloads and a variety of data-intensive applications. Strengthening data center network security is a strategic imperative that will stop threats, preserve operational resilience and avoid catastrophic data losses and downtime.
What are the key security challenges in modern data center networks?
Rapidly evolving connectivity technologies, increasing reliance on data-intensive applications and well-equipped attackers are making it tougher than ever for data center operators to secure their networks. Organizations need to address tough security challenges to keep their networks safe.
- New technologies and traffic create security gaps
AI, cloud and high-volume east–west traffic are transforming data center networks and exposing new security vulnerabilities. - The data center fabric is the target
Attackers now home in on the network fabric to exploit weaknesses in the control plane and take advantage of easy lateral movement. - Service outages are expensive
Outages caused by failures in AI data centers can have a major economic impact, including sunk cost, wasted GPU processing time and needless power consumption. - Clouds give attackers more opportunities
Edge, hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity expand the attack surface and make it hard to consistently enforce security policies. - Perimeter security is inflexible
Traditional perimeter-based approaches no longer scale, which leaves east–west traffic vulnerable to attack. - One breach can have a major business impact
A single data center fabric breach can disrupt services, violate compliance and cause lasting financial and brand damage.
of DDoS attacks end within five minutes
of major incidents take more than a week to fully recover—long enough to impact uptime, revenue and trust
of high-cost breaches are linked to insider actions or mistakes
Source: Nokia Threat Intelligence Report 2025
A new security approach for the AI and cloud era
We believe the shift to cloud-enabled and AI-driven data center networks will allow organizations to rethink their approach to security. By replacing perimeter-based models with security capabilities embedded directly into the network fabric, organizations can reduce risk and make their data centers more agile and resilient.
Our solutions focus on the concepts of fortification, validation and trust to provide secure data center networking with comprehensive protection and future resilience.
With this approach, organizations can:
Fortify
We empower organizations to fortify their data center fabrics by embedding security directly into the network foundation itself. Through zero-trust architectures, intelligent segmentation, and resilient infrastructure, we transform security from a defensive necessity into an enabler for the AI and cloud era.
Validate
Our AIOps-driven approach transforms telemetry, automation, and real-time intelligence into actionable assurance, to deliver proactive defense that allows organizations to shift from reactive incident response to intelligent threat mitigation.
Trust
By prioritizing confidentiality at scale, we help organizations maintain compliance, build unwavering trust across the WAN and to the hybrid cloud ecosystem, to secure a competitive edge in a dynamic AI and digital landscape.
Our secure data center networking approach moves beyond defending infrastructure. It is about creating a resilient, automated and trusted foundation for AI, cloud and digital business transformation.
Explore our secure data center networking toolkit
Our solutions make it easy to implement zero-trust data center security and automated security defenses to protect data center networks against breaches and ensure efficiency and compliance. With proactive, integrated strategies and solutions that prioritize security, organizations can stop threats and avoid catastrophic data loss and operational downtime.
Solution
Data Center Gateway
Learn how the Nokia Data Center Gateway can help you optimize data center connectivity, performance, scalability and reliability.
Topic
Quantum-safe networks
Making critical infrastructure quantum-safe.
Solution
IPsec Security Gateway
Fortify your AI vision and digital transformation with IPsec
Topic
Data center networks
We help the world's most innovative companies transform their data centers, unlocking new revenue streams and boosting operational efficiency with our advanced data center…
Topic
DDoS security
Defend your network against botnets and application-layer attacks with an AI-driven DDoS security for fast and accurate detection and real-time mitigation
Frequently asked questions
The convergence of AI, cloud and increasingly distributed workloads has fundamentally changed the security requirements of data center networks. As east–west traffic volumes grow and hybrid and multi-cloud environments expand, traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient. Organizations need security that is built directly into the network fabric.
We believe secure data center networking should provide protection across the entire network continuum—from the data center fabric to cloud interconnections and WAN gateways. This will help organizations reduce risk, maintain compliance and ensure business continuity in an AI-driven world.
Our view is that trust should never be assumed simply because a user, application or workload resides inside the data center. Modern threats exploit lateral movement opportunities within highly connected environments, making implicit trust a significant security weakness.
To address this challenge, we recommend implementing zero-trust segmentation through microsegmentation, identity-based controls and embedded security capabilities. This approach helps contain attacks, limit the spread of ransomware and protect critical AI, cloud and business workloads while maintaining operational flexibility.
We believe visibility is the foundation of effective security. Security teams can’t protect what they can’t see. In increasingly dynamic environments, manual monitoring and reactive operations are no longer enough.
We advocate a proactive security model based on deep and broad fine-grained access to network data, including state. This requires a network operating system that is built using model-driven management across its entire system and that leverages on-change streaming telemetry, AI-driven network intelligence, automation and digital twin validation.
By continuously collecting and analyzing network data, organizations can detect anomalies earlier, automate responses faster and reduce the operational impact of cyber threats. The goal is to move from reacting to incidents to anticipating and preventing them.
We believe security policies should follow applications and data wherever they reside. As organizations distribute workloads across private data centers, public clouds, edge locations and WAN interconnections, maintaining consistent protection becomes increasingly challenging.
Our approach is to extend segmentation, quantum-safe network cryptography, security policy enforcement and operational visibility across all environments through centralized automation and orchestration. This creates a consistent security posture across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments while simplifying operations and reducing potential trust gaps between domains.
We define a trusted data center network as one that is intrinsically secure, highly automated and built to support the demands of AI-era applications. Security should not be an overlay added after deployment. It should be embedded into the network architecture from the outset.
This philosophy is reflected in our "fortify, validate and drive trust" framework:
- Fortify the network with built-in security, segmentation and threat mitigation.
- Validate the environment through automation, telemetry and continuous security assurance.
- Drive trust through confidentiality, quantum-safe technologies and resilient interconnection capabilities.
The outcome is a network that helps organizations reduce risk, protect critical workloads, strengthen compliance and build confidence in their AI and digital transformation investment.