How to ensure the resilience of a Data Center?

A fire that occurred recently, in a large-scale data center in France, raised a very interesting discussion on social media, leaving thousands of companies and websites down for days.

But, after all, why a Data Center with ISO27000 certification didn’t prevent a serious incident like this from occurring? Or, even if it does, why didn't you prevent the losses?

Questions like this were common on technical forums and, even on LinkedIn, where companies proactively informed their customers and the market about the progress of solving the crisis.

The fact is, there is enormous confusion about data center standardization. ISO27000, for example, deals with information security and there’s no mention of data center infrastructure issues, much less of constructive details, design of electrical systems and not even of air conditioning.

So, where can we find the appropriate rules that can guarantee business continuity according to the criticality of the Data Center and, furthermore, how to measure the resilience of each Data Center?

Some organizations around the world have standards that govern the Data Center infrastructure and sometimes certify them. Some examples of this are Uptime Institute and BICSI, as both have clear rules for classifying Data Center infrastructure into Tiers.

In general, a Tier 1 Data Center has a very low resiliency, and it increases until it reaches the top of the ranking as Tier 4. Through this ranking it’s possible to calculate the downtime of each site according to its design.

This decision must be taken still in the design phase, so that it is possible to build a Data Center that adheres to the minimum requirements of the standard. These project drawings can be sent to one of these certifying institutes, in order to ensure an approval and a guarantee certification that the infrastructure adheres to that classification.

In this way, it’s possible for the customer to be sure that their data and its processing are in a Data Center that’s secure against infrastructure failures, even without knowing the details of the environment, as it has already been accredited by an institute that carried out the validation.