As professional computing services continue the trend towards remote access, businesses are relying on more and more on thin clients and centralized processing. Rather than furnish every workstation with a fixed desktop, most companies prefer the efficiency and cost savings of hoteling, work location flexibility and portability by provisioning laptops and other mobile devices with wireless access and connections to web-enabled, centralized systems and applications from a single computer room.
Data Centres can be a tremendous asset to an organization, but only if they operate in a reliable, resilient fashion. If a data centre operation is not managed with high availability in mind, lack of precaution can result in exposure to extended periods of downtime, lost revenue, and frustration.
Making a data centre resilient to potential disaster is an important objective of conducting a Risk and Threat Assessment. Using a basic checklist appraisal, a company is able to see whether or not their data centre needs improvements to operate continuously, with a minimum downtime.
The data centre threat and risk assessment examines how well a centre is outfitted for uninterrupted operation. Monitors and alarms should cover the following:
- Efficient cooling – The amount of heat produced by a room full of electronic equipment can be significant. If there is insufficient cooling to maintain the temperature of hardware, it can overheat and fail in most unpredictable ways.
- Humidity control – Under or over-humidification can cause damaging condensation and corrosion, or most likely, a build-up of static charge that could result in sparks, which harm electronic equipment.
- Water detection – the presence of water on the floor of any computer room should be alarmed for obvious reasons. Flood and water leakage problems can be caused by adjacent water and sanitary lines, leakage from floors above, faulty sprinkler systems, etc.
- Power interruptions – should be monitored and reported, even if UPS and emergency power systems compensate for brief outages. Reporting & diagnosing the causes of power supply problems may prevent future incidents. Also, any unexpected glitches with back-up power systems should be noted and resolved promptly.
- Effective security access control– For a data centre to safeguard IT assets, it must have appropriate security. That would include for example, card-in / card-out access for only authorized personnel and alarms on emergency exit, door ajar or security system failure situations. Similarly, if essential employees are ever barred entrance, then security management systems must be adjusted.
Companies conducting a risk and threat assessment will typically investigate these key elements of data centre operations, to ensure end-to-end monitoring and control processes are in-place to effectively protect businesses from unnecessary incidents and reduce operational downtime when uncontrollable events occur.
