Nick Razey, CEO
How safe is your Data Centre? The security of your data has never been more important and the cost of an outage has never been higher. While many hours are consumed poring over the intricacies of highly resilient power and cooling systems much less attention is given to the problem of basic physical security.In their research Gartner analysts Rob Addy and Tiny Haynes agree that the physical occupation or destruction of data centres and their contents are often downplayed. They go on to point out that the bombing of the financial district of London's Docklands in February 1996 demonstrated the vulnerability of data centre buildings and surrounding areas to major disruption caused by a terrorist bomb.
We hope that you read their findings below and also the NGD article which shows how we have addressed this major threat.
- Predicts 2013: Infrastructure Services Threatened as New Structural, Political, Competitive and Commercial Challenges Emerge
- J. Hagerty |Rob Addy|Bryan Britz|Tiny Haynes|Bob Igou| Christine Tenneson
- 18 December 2012
- Data center hijackings, compute futures exchanges, enforced support bundle splits, and the dangers of overpromoting automation may conspire to make infrastructure services markets ever-more hostile. Here we predict the impact of these challenges.
Key Findings
- The infrastructure services market is maturing. Commoditization is forcing providers to invest in automation and analytics to deliver more and better with significantly fewer resources.
- The proliferation of standardized services will drive the adoption of utility services. Such service capacity will be freely traded on open futures markets governed by financial regulators.
- The concentration of workloads in fewer data centers will mean these data centers will increasingly be targets for crime and terrorism. Providers must protect their facilities from heightened threats or be forced to do so by external regulation. Access the Gartner report.
NGD – Nowhere Safer
- Security is the Key
- NGD was formed in 2007 by a group of IT and telecoms professionals who believed that the changing nature of the Data Centre industry demanded a new style of facility design. While historically Data Centres had clustered around London Docklands due to massive fibre connectivity costs, a new reality was emerging. Fibre was no longer expensive and the single biggest operating cost – power – was rising steadily as supply was squeezed. With sky high real estate prices and employment costs, congested urban areas like London were certainly not a cheap place to be based. But for the NGD management it was the security issue which dominated the decision of where to house mission critical data.
Read More - Government Regulation of Data Centres
- Gartner have forewarned senior IT decision makers that by 2016 it is likely government regulation will dictate minimum physical levels of security for data centre infrastructure. No longer will it be acceptable to store data in facilities that do not have rigorous security protocols so executives must prepare now for this change. In the UK, 2012 saw the government mount its most visible campaign to date for raising business awareness of cyber security threats: 2013 will be the year when this focus is extended to the data centre. NGD wholeheartedly welcomes this development.
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