Data center operators face an increasingly hostile landscape. As investment in cloud, AI, and big data analysis continues to grow, the facilities hosting these critical workloads become bigger targets to security threats. The value of information housed in data centers opens the pathway to potential damage caused by an unplanned outage.
Physical data center breaches remain rare. Between 2006 and 2016, there were only five reported physical incidents of sabotage or theft of equipment from a data center. By contrast, there were dozens — almost hundreds — of significant data breaches as a result of cyberattacks in the first half of 2023 alone. Nevertheless, researchers from the Uptime Institute note in a recent report, when it comes to physical security and data centers, “a lack of incidents across the industry is a sign of success,” not of a lack of credible threats.