To assess the safety of a data center
The security of a datacenter, is the security of your data or those customers. Do not be fooled by security pretexts, marketing often also, to avoid questions about the real conditions of operation and maintenance of your site hosting.
Data centers are the factories of modern times. They host Internet : websites, les emails, data and photographs of individuals ; but also corporate data. At the centralization of IT and cloud computing, they become the backbone of the digital economy. A failed datacenter, and thousands of people may be deprived of network, Phone, emails or data.
For all that, we do not know well their security. Often under the guise of confidentiality, some operators of data centers provide little information on their thermal architecture, electric, and failures encountered. This communication is rather made by users who have to suffer an outage. There is no standard defining the security of a datacenter.
Criteria based on the architecture of datacenters enable a private, l’Uptime institute, classify datacenters. They are categorized as « Tier I » to « Tier IV ». However, these categories are often used wrongly and without control by designers datacenters. Furthermore, they do not take into account new data center configurations and operating process.
To know the security of its datacenter, Here are some basic questions that it seems useful to ask their host :
It is necessary to check the fault tolerance of the cooling system. The network is it doubled ? Production units of cold are they redundant ?
At electrical bays, how many power sources are distributed ? Is it different phases of the same channel, which is not a security ; or channels produced by separate inverters ? Computer servers are they connected to two separate sources ?
– The fiber-optic networks data center must be secure. How many conveyances optical fiber are present ? The optical fiber paths they are disjoint from one end : in the street and in the building ? points of presence until berries operator customers ?
You can never be certain that an incident will not occur in a datacenter. However, it is quite essential to be very demanding vis-à-vis its host in terms of safety, availability and operating conditions. Safety is not to be walled in underground and excuse solicitor. Safety is first and foremost a question of resources and processes but also clear and transparent vis-à-vis its customers’ information.