Enterprises demand a lot of their data centers, which means the performance and availability of the data center is paramount. Infrastructure and application architectures are designed to work in concert with each other. If any component is incorrectly sized or configured, this has the potential to impact the user experience. Network security is essential in a data center architecture to ensure the availability and security of the protected network.

Data center network security is a term used to describe a class of devices that provide network security for the data center. There are several device types in this category, of which the data center firewall (DCFW) and the data center intrusion prevention system (DCIPS) are the most well-known, each having been deployed for a number of years. A third type of device combines the capabilities of the DCFW and DCIPS and is referred to as a data center security gateway (DCSG).