Knowledge facilities are answerable for running many of the services that underpin the techniques we work together with each day. Transportation, logistics, vitality, finance, nationwide safety, well being techniques, and different lifeline providers all depend on up-to-the-second knowledge saved in and accessed by way of knowledge facilities. On a regular basis actions comparable to debit and bank card funds, sending emails, reserving tickets, receiving textual content messages, utilizing social media, serps, and AI chatbots, streaming TV, making video calls, and storing digital pictures all depend on knowledge facilities.
These buildings now join such an unimaginable vary of actions and utilities throughout authorities, enterprise, and society that any downtime can have main penalties. The UK authorities has formally labeled knowledge facilities as forming a part of the nation’s critical national infrastructure—a transfer that additionally conveniently permits the federal government to justify building many more of these energy-guzzling facilities.
As I sit pondering the concrete actuality of the cloud in Cyberfort’s ready space, the corporate’s chief digital officer, Rob Arnold, emerges from a hall. It was Arnold who organized my go to, and we head for his workplace—by way of a safety door with a biometric fingerprint lock—the place he talks me by way of the logic of the bunkered knowledge heart.
“The issue with most above-ground knowledge facilities is they’re typically constructed shortly, and never constructed to resist bodily threats like sturdy winds, automotive bombs, or server theft from breaking and getting into.” Arnold says that “most individuals have a tendency to think about the cyber facet of knowledge safety—hackers, viruses, and cyberattacks—which dangerously overlooks the bodily facet.”
Amid growing geopolitical stress, web infrastructure is now a high-value goal as “hybrid” or “cyber-physical” sabotage (when cyberattacks are combined with physical attacks) turns into more and more frequent.
The significance of bodily web safety has been highlighted by the battle in Ukraine, the place drone strikes and different assaults on digital infrastructure have led to internet shutdowns. Whereas exact particulars concerning the variety of knowledge facilities destroyed within the battle stay scant, it has been observed that Russian assaults on native knowledge facilities in Ukraine have led many organizations emigrate their knowledge to cloud services positioned outdoors of the battle zone.
Bunkers enchantment to what Arnold calls “security-conscious” purchasers. He says: “It’s troublesome to discover a construction safer than a bunker”—earlier than including drily: “The consumer won’t survive the apocalypse, however their knowledge will.”
Cyberfort makes a speciality of serving regulated industries. Its buyer base contains firms working in protection, well being care, finance, and important infrastructure. “Our core providing focuses on offering safe, sovereign, and compliant cloud and data-center providers,” Arnold explains in a well-rehearsed gross sales routine. “We do extra for our prospects than simply host techniques—we defend their reputations.”
Arnold’s pitch is disrupted by a knock on the door. The top of safety (who I’m calling Richard Thomas right here) enters—a 6-foot-tall ex-Royal Marine carrying black cargo trousers, black fight boots, and a black Cyberfort-branded polo shirt. Thomas goes to point out me across the facility right this moment.
