Every day, attackers conspire to take down applications and steal data, leaving your data center infrastructure in the crosshairs. Storing the most valuable and most visible assets in your organization – your web, DNS, database, and email servers – data centers have become the number one target of cyber criminals, hacktivists and state-sponsored attackers. This paper describes the impact of current security threats and reveals the latest methods, tools and techniques used by attackers to exploit data center resources. Then it lays out a framework to mitigate these threats leveraging technologies that are already present in most data centers today.