Data centres have always been secure, tightly controlled
facilities, but 9/11 brought about changes that pushed security
and physical protections to even higher levels. Data centres
today, particularly those serving as colocation facilities, are
more likely to have multiple points of security that may include
physical barriers such as crash-resistant fences and high-tech
defenses such as biometric identification systems. It's less
likely today that backup and recovery data centres will be built
near one another. And new data centres are more likely to be
built outside of urban areas. "Data centre designers have always
been mindful of security concerns," said Tad Davies, an
executive vice-president at Bick Group, an IT services provider
whose work includes data centre design. "What 9/11 caused us to
do is think broader and on a massive scale." Davies said he
knows of one company that relocated its data centre to a site
that was within a four-hour drive of its backup data centres.
The reason: It wanted to be ce