Quote from ofthomas:
from experience, well... what we do ...
we own the servers, we rent the floor space(cages) or racks... those are locked... access to the facilities is limited to (and I mean this) like 3 people within the LLT team... they are escorted in, and out... the facilities are usually CCTV protected, everything recorded... I know our ITRM reviews the tapes weekly...
on the servers, instrumentation on the iLOM side alerts when anything is removed/down/taken offline/etc... that goes to the NOC, gets logged into ITSM, tickets are opened, etc... so there is an audit trail for anything and everything...
firewall from the outside, 2 layers... but flat network(arista) once you get in... Feed A/B for the market data (solarflares)... separate network (Redundant as well) to the OE side.. (depending on server function really)...
every activity on the server gets logged... locally and remotely at the same time... every shell session, etc... there is also two factor auth to get into the server (remotely that is)...
to make it simple... you have to trust the admins touching the systems... usually the co-lo staff doesnt touch them... everything is redundant within the servers and they are also redundant themselves in different cabinets, etc...
the op we have might be different... the LLT org is at pretty much every venue out there depending on the exchange and depending on what LOB are out there they also have a given number of servers, etc... so usually there are more than 3-4 racks onsite for us...
in any event, the code itself is usually compiled and obsfuscated, broken down into libraries that contain the GAT strategies, and components that each do something, etc...
overall, hard to steal... and if you are the admin... you still need the infra to run it... so unless you have deep pockets, hard to do...
