Despite recent warnings that electric power is becoming more expensive and scarce in Washington and its environs, a plethora of datacenter build projects are continuing to be attracted to the region.
In Northern Virginia, for instance, 22 computer datacenters have been built, and 24 more are on the way, according to Dominion.
This trend towards the area is being partly fuelled by the US government's increasing use of privately-owned datacenters.
To capitalize on this outsourced environment security parameters have been increased to the highest levels, capable of withstanding the most determined attacks. Both Terramark and Savvis are targeting federal agencies either with Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility standards or not. SCIF outlines stringent physical security requirements, such as the thickness of doors, the strength of concrete and the use of alarms and acoustical controls to prevent any eavesdropping within facilities, including by electronic means.
Writing in Computer World, Patrick Thibodeau says that by emphasizing security, the private data center operators may also be trying to convince the government that their facilities are more secure than existing federal facilities are. Government data centers aren't always paragons of security. For instance, in a report issued last month the Government Accountability Office cited a variety of physical security issues at IRS data centers, mostly centering around access by personnel who didn't have a need to be there.
In an earlier report last summer about information security issues within the government as a whole the GAO said that at one datacenter, which it didn't identify, it found 400 individuals who had unrestricted access to the entire facility - even though their jobs didn't require such access. "Many of the data losses that occurred at federal agencies over the past few years . . . were a result of physical thefts or improper safeguarding of systems, including laptops and other portable devices," the GAO wrote in that report.