Page 75 - Cyber Warnings

Why The Human Element Is The Biggest Point Of Failure In Your

Data Center

You’ve probably taken pretty extensive measures to protect the servers in
your data center. But have you covered everything? What about your
employees?
by Tim Mullahy, General Manager, Liberty Center One

Here’s a story for you: you’re managing a high-end data center.

Your servers are properly maintained, and your server room is fully climate controlled. You’ve
multiple backup generators, and your network routes are fully redundant. On paper, your facility
is functionally immune to downtime.

Then you wake up early one morning to a notification, and hear words that send a chill down
your spine. Catastrophic failure. Unscheduled downtime. Lost data.

What happened?

Turns out that in spite of all the measures you took to keep things running, somebody failed to
follow your maintenance procedure. Hardware that should have been examined and replaced
was left running, and that eventually cascaded into something far, far worse than a few bum
components.

Disasters and unavoidable failures can happen, but the core truth of data center management is
that 70% of outages can be directly attributed to human error.

Just look at the recent downtime at Spark, New Zealand’s largest telecom provider. Although
inclement weather did play a role in downtime, had Spark been examining its infrastructure for
ongoing weaknesses - the downtime would have likely been much reduced.

If you’d like another example, look at what happened with Swedish infrastructure company
Telia, a network provider which had an engineer inadvertently send all of Europe’s traffic to
Hong Kong.

It isn’t just human error, either. Disgruntled employees can cause just as much harm to your
data center as ignorant or careless ones. Incidents such as the 2011 equipment theft at
Vodafone or the 2015 storage device theft at RSA can cause an outage, a PR disaster
(complete with legal and regulatory fines), or both.

In short, it’s in your best interest to reduce the risk that someone’s going to mess something up -
either intentionally or otherwise.

75 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – August 2016 Edition
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