of the facility boundary where circuits are grouped together, as this creates a potential single point of failure.
Data Cabinet The physical design and construction of the data cabinet is another area that can be too easily overlooked. Hinges should be designed so that they cannot be accessed without the cabinet being unlocked. The same is true for removable door
panels. These should be connected in such a way as to require the cabinet to be unlocked front and rear before access to the locking mechanisms holding panels can be released. The roof also needs to be thought
through carefully. Access through the roof for cables should be large enough for cables but small enough to prevent anyone reaching in to try and unlatch a door or panel. Floors are a particular issue as a lot of
services are often provided through the floors. Solid steel floors should be fitted so that even if a cabinet is tilted, there is no access other than that provisioned for cabling. To add extra security and prevent damage to services before they reach the rack, the under floor area should be considered a secure area. Access should be heavily restricted even to the point of needing certificates to gain access.
Physical security The physical security to get into a data cabinet is something that should be considered carefully. For example - keys. It might seem sensible to get the right locks for the doors and fit them as part of the initial build of the cabinet but keys can get lost or misplaced. Once that happens, all the locks should be replaced.
Our policy is to ensure that the
cabinets are supplied with the locks and keys separately. This allows the fitting team to complete their works and only when the customer comes to commission the cabinet are the locks actually fitted and the keys secured. If using keys, then there is a decision
as to whether all cabinets need to be dual locked or just certain cabinets.
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It is also important to use security covers over electronic locks as these will indicate if there has been unauthorised key accessed entry into the cabinet. Electronic locks are growing in popularity with biometrics and swipe cards the most common solutions. Both of these have fallen drastically in cost for customers over the last decade which has added to their popularity.
Record Everything Any access system should provide a non volatile record of entry and ideally this should be done through the initial records being recorded by equipment inside the rack that then uses a secure link to an external source. As well as an audit trail, video should be used. This will be constantly running but will only save data for a given period either side of a recordable incident. This prevents the video from being overloaded with non useful data and makes it easier to store, search and transmit.
Location One of the key elements of a redundant data centre is that it is connected to a partner. In major European cities this means that the data centres are located around 30km apart. If you have outsourced your entire data centre operation to third party facilities or run your own centralised facilities, this has to be planned. One of the reasons 30km is common
around Europe is that the metropolitan area networks (MAN) that ring the major cities make it easy to locate data centres either side of a city. Another key advantage is that 30km is a short enough distance to prevent latency from causing problems with applications. As applications move into the cloud, the issue of latency is increasingly becoming a concern for IT managers. Some organisations prefer to run
their own facility and use a partner for resilience. As a result, there has been a number of what can best be described as boutique data centre operators appearing in the market. These operators are taking over inner city sites where they can be located close to high
NETCOMMS europe Volume III Issue 3 2013 15
value customers and act as an extension of the customer data centre. Many of these facilities offer unique
features such as ultra-high bandwidth or optimisation for a specific industry segment. The most common of these segments is financial services but the increasing use of external data centres by government agencies has also driven specialist facility designs. When considering these facilities it is important to ensure that they can prove that they have a partner who can provide failover in case of a problem. When there is a secondary site, the
cabinets and security must match or exceed that of the primary site. If they do not, then the entire system is compromised.
Conclusion The cost of creating a tier 4 data centre can be in the tens of millions of pounds. Solutions like the Cannon T4 Modular data centre, for main or disaster recovery sites, significantly less. But making the data cabinets secure will cost even less. If either site is compromised then the investment can only be seen as being flawed.
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