Safety from natural disasters isn’t a new requirement, but increasing wildfire activity has the potential to encroach on areas that have previously been a safe location for a data center.
Chatha said once natural disasters are taken into account, whether it be wildfires or flood zones, data center risk management is heavily influenced by municipalities, including zoning and the local power grid – is the power available?
Other considerations where data center risk management must consider location is proximity to connectivity and the quality of network providers in the area – you need great reliability and speed that ensure you avoid latency for your end users.
“Connectivity used to be the biggest barrier in site selection, but that's much easier to manage and deploy these days versus the power constraint,” Chatha said.
Real estate costs are also a consideration when locating your data center, not just for a new build but when considering expansions. If you use a third party managed service provider, their real estate pressures could affect the cost of your services as well as available capacity.
Balancing the Ecosystem with Data Center Risk Management
A data center has a thousand moving parts. It itself is a cog in the organizational wheel, so to speak. One small misalignment upsets the whole equilibrium of the organization, across departments.
Risk mitigation, therefore, is a shared responsibility. Each employee or stakeholder can help keep the facility operating at its optimal level either by following or by enforcing the rules and learning how to do both better. IT leaders should know exactly where and how much it costs to keep everyone trained and have access to resources they need to carry out any tasks where the data center is involved. The responsibility falls on the CTO or CIO to set expectations and give clarity on these operations.
Of course, data centers or the IT infrastructure itself doesn’t function in isolation. Spending money on data center risk management may not necessarily be a top priority for all managers – most departmental objectives pale in comparison to meeting revenue targets.
“Conflicting goals can be hard to address, but one of the most effective methods of doing so is to have a highly efficient process for continuously identifying where a risk resides. You also need a predictable, reliable method of updating systems without impacting the overarching business goals of the organization,” said Gavin Millard, VP of Product Marketing at Tenable.
And in a competitive seller’s market, data center risk management has become increasingly dynamic, with power now the key consideration, Chathra said. “Connectivity used to be the biggest barrier, but it’s much easier to manage and deploy these days versus the power constraint.”
Chathra has been in the data center industry for decades, and he said even the sellers are constrained by power companies. “Small guys like us are just kind of going wherever we can find a little bit of power here and there and deploy.”
