The AFCOM association, whose members include 4,500 administrators from 3,900 data centers around the world surveyed 436 data center sites last year. Some of the findings of the survey indicated that cyberterrorism is an increasing concern, mainframe deployment is on the decline, storage deployment is on the rise, and “green” technologies are definitely happening.
It was found that there is a shift in data centers away from mainframe computers and toward other types of servers.Just less than 40 percent of data centers run two or more mainframes, with 45.7 percent of such data centers planning to replace at least one of their mainframes in the next year. However 33 percent of those replacing mainframes plan to replace them with other types of servers.
The more worrying fact that this study conducted in July2009 has brought to light is that 60.9 percent of data centers worldwide officially recognize cyberterrorism as a real threat but ironically only about one-third of respondents included cyber terrorism in their disaster-recovery plans. The survey has unveiled a major void in data centers in terms of securing its critical data against a very real possibility of cyber attacks.The report goes on to note that currently only about one of every four data centers addresses cyberterrorism, and one in five has procedures in place to prevent an attack. That means the remaining 4 out of five data centers are left dangerously vulnerable . The problem becomes more critical as several data centers expect massive expansion due to dramatic increase in storage demands and aggressive business plans in the next five years. The study finds that 22.0% will utilize a co-location center to meet their increased space requirements and 13.8% will use Managed Hosting services. In this age of cloud computing which has become unavoidable in terms of the ease of services it provides and the undeniable cost reductions it brings, the threat of breach of security is something that every company has to assess. As you let go of total control over your computing, critical client information will end up in the “cloud “ or your co-location service provider.
Green Rack systems can help prepare your center for cyber attacks and arrive at a reliable risk management strategy. Contact us also for a free briefing on how our co-location facility can vouch for the safety of the data you trust us with and the recovery procedures we will implement in the event of cyber terrorism.
