How next-gen data centres are keeping mission-critical operations up and running?

Data centres and facilities like military centres, hospitals, public safety centres, laboratories, etc., are termed as mission-critical.

Mission-critical nextgen data centre computing is a scalable, reliable, and secure procedure supporting the operations and processes of enterprises. Such procedures directly support the customers and end-users of those organizations. Thus, data centre service support is essential for companies to maintain their mission-critical operations, failure of which may entail significant reputational and financial damage.

Data Centre Support for Mission-Critical Operations

If the mission-critical infrastructure and systems of the military and government organizations go down, there can be a direct effect on a nation's security. In sectors such as logistics, airline reservations, border security, retail, and banking, nextgen data centres help to provide capabilities for high transaction volumes.

Today, data centres support mission-critical, social- and mobile-enabled as well as customer-facing applications, which are made popular by IT consumerization. The number of applications like finance, HR, CRM, web, collaboration, and others has increased as enterprises have expanded consumer touch-points across several devices and channels.

Nextgen data centres, thus, support typical applications used by companies such as social business, m-commerce, e-commerce, customer support, and more. In today's tech-driven world, users expect systems and services to be readily available whenever needed or wanted. A downtime of even a few minutes can cause considerable damage to company business, and may lead to consumer dissatisfaction as well as reputational damage,

The popularity of IoT (Internet of Things) makes the average individual heavily dependent on technology and connectivity - not only for mission-critical business operations but also for daily life needs like personal devices, home automation, etc. Nextgen data centres protect their uptime on several levels. They use redundant power along with workload features, and are well-equipped with adequate backup capabilities to ensure operational competency, even during a power outage.

Location is Vital

Nextgen data centres are typically located in places that do not generally experience bad weather conditions like hurricanes, tornados, or flooding, and has an advanced infrastructure providing protection against natural calamities. The location also helps providers to boost energy efficiency and save considerable money over the long term.

The facilities comply with current guidelines and regulations concerning energy use in data centres. In addition, a data centre site's fiberoptic connectivity, power capacity, geography, and security are all important.

Data centres consume a lot of power. They need advanced energy systems and infrastructure, so a reliable power grid is one of the main location selection factors. Many nextgen data centres are using microgrids to get an assured supply of high- quality, dependable power that is available when the main grid becomes congested or unavailable.

Another important feature of data centres is their redundancy capabilities, which directly supports and facilitates the protection of critical business data stored in servers and drives. Redundancies ensure the existence of critical data in more than just one place, such as an on-site data centre facility backup as well as off-site backups. Such redundancies enable you to recover data if anything happens to your servers or drives, ensuring business restart normal operations promptly.

In addition, the environment needs to be evaluated for risks like flood plain dangers, seismic activity, exposure to bad weather events, and others.

Utmost Security is Essential

Apart from a good location, modern data centres also utilize advanced security features that include several levels of cyber and physical security. The latter ensures safe access to the data centre and its server rooms by only authorized personnel. Data centre physical security has seen remarkable improvement, and nextgen facilities implement it at all levels.

Physical security areas include equipment racks, computer room, building/facility perimeter, site perimeter, and others. It is difficult to design a uniform security system for all data centres as technology is not available to quickly, cheaply, and easily verify an individual's identity with assurance.

Therefore, data centres use a combination of security technologies and progress from the least sensitive outer areas to the most sensitive inner locales. For instance, personnel need to use a secured biometric access control system to enter the building. Similarly, to access the server room, one has to use a keypad code with biometric systems as an added layer of security. By combining security methods at entry points, data centres are able to improve reliability at those places. Utilizing different methods at each level considerably improves security at the innermost levels.

Remote Site Management

Modern data centres enhance redundancy in their mission-critical hubs by deploying IT systems for remote site management and monitoring. If there is downtime at a company's mission-critical centre, the whole load can be immediately moved to an advanced data centre that can capably safeguard mission-critical data.

To meet the ever-evolving needs of businesses, STT GDC India's state-of-the-art colocation data centres will cater to your company needs and drive business growth. Our 18 state-of-the-art colocation data centre facilities with India's largest floor area at more than 2.5mnsq. Ft. spread across 9 cities and offering an IT Load of ~>135 MW.

Discover a robust and comprehensive cyber and physical security structure that shields mission-critical operations of organizations from cyber-attacks and downtime, and serve as a vital loss mitigation method