Scoping data center cybersecurity

The Uptime Institute Data Center Resiliency Survey 2024 found that cyberattacks are the root cause of up to a fifth of data center outages caused by networking and connectivity, IT systems and software or third-party service supplier issues. The incidence of data center outages caused by cyberattacks is rising. Cybercriminals and state-sponsored threat actors are now expanding their focus beyond IT to include critical operational technology infrastructure, such as power and cooling systems. Cybersecurity has, therefore, become an essential aspect of outage prevention and resiliency planning.

This is the first report in a series of tutorials on data center security to help data center operators define their approaches to cybersecurity. The aim is to create an implementation playbook for the data center.