In the digital world, data centres serve as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. As long as a power source is available, it ensures that the information is available whenever needed. As a result of the construction of the facility, a large amount of data will be stored and processed on several high-density servers. The daily operation consumes a large amount of power as well as produces large amounts of heat. As a result, the facility's temperature increases due to this increase in energy consumption.
An average large data centre consumes enough power to power a city with a population of 1,000,000. The excess heat in the building is removed by installing cooling systems. Data centres can end up overheating if the cooling system is inadequate, and as a result, data centres can overheat.
When the data center becomes too hot there can be equipment failures that result in downtime, which is caused by overheating. There will be a significant impact on the whole business operation as a result of this.
There is a risk that it can ruin the relationship between the owner of a data centre and the corporate client, especially in a colocation centre.
There have been instances where overheating has resulted in the loss of millions of dollars or even whole businesses. Due to this reason, the temperature in the data centre must be maintained at an optimum level to prevent overheating.
Heat is Being Weaponized By Attackers
To reduce energy costs, companies usually trade slightly higher temperatures in data centres for lower energy costs. In one way or another, this will lead to a data centre breach or meltdown at the very least. The cost of being able to create a secure data centre cannot be reduced through cost-saving measures.
Energy costs have spiralled out of control as a result of environmental concerns.
Attackers aim to exploit the cooling systems of data centres to exfiltrate billions of dollars worth of data by weaponizing heat.
Many nation-state-funded cybercrime groups today are funded by cybercriminals, but many more are supported by sophisticated attacks using the heat of data centres as a weapon that can inflict serious damage.
Microsoft recently experienced a major server outage. It was forced to take its cloud services offline for 16 hours due to a problem with a row of servers that overheated as they were trying to update their firmware. Outlook and Hotmail were also affected.
An earlier update had been successfully performed. However, the latest update out of the blue blew when it was expected, and the temperature immediately rose. By the time the temperature had been mitigated, the data centre had already begun to suffer because of the heat.
A physical region located within the data centre had to be assigned to the core infrastructure to bring the core infrastructure back online. This required both infrastructure software and human intervention to make the move successful.
As part of its energy conservation strategy, Microsoft operates its data centres at lower temperatures to save energy, but this strategy also results in a spike in inlet temperatures that can be difficult to deal with. In this case, the strategy provided Microsoft with enough time to recover from a cooling failure. Especially in high-density data centres like Microsoft's, the risk of overheating is evident.
There is a growing awareness that operators are developing many innovative new strategies to meet these challenging goals. Examples include using more renewable energy resources, water-efficient cooling systems and waste heat recovery technologies to make data centres more sustainable.
The data centre industry must balance sustainability with cyber-resilience as a means of reducing its environmental footprint. It is possible to amplify security risks if you do not manage them as part of an overall data centre cybersecurity plan if you use sustainable solutions such as outside air cooling, which delivers energy savings.
There is no way for data centres to lose sight of cutting costs and securing cooling and infrastructure without sacrificing these vital components for the gains in sustainability. It is time for companies to embrace sustainability over risk in the race to improve data centre sustainability.
