Green and Secure - Hand in hand for data centers By Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jun 10 2010)

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   If you want to have a successful data center business, you might want to focus your efforts on being secure as well as being green.  Sure, it's nice to have a LEED certification and being the cleanest on the block, but there's a new scam, er scheme every week for energy efficiency.  But individuals, corporations, and government entities are going to start looking harder at security, especially if they want to move resources from in-house to the cloud -- whatever "cloud" means this week.

   A green data center with a red flag for security breaches will soon be a dead data center.  Google just published a white paper detailing its security policies for its apps suite -- made up of the nearly ubiquitous Gmail, along with Google Calendar, Google Docs, and the rest of the crowd -- and it's interesting reading for the rest of us, especially if we ignore the brouhaha about the company "inadvertently" collected all that Wi-Fi data during the process of taking street level pictures for Google maps.

   The Goog's security vision is based around a multi-layer security strategy with controls at multiple levels of data storage, access, and transfer, including ten (yes 10!) components ranging from the company's corporate security policies to physical and environmental security to regulatory compliance.   

   It's all good stuff, but for many businesses and government buyers it just isn't good enough.  While U.S. Army recruiters are using the Salesforce.com CRM service to manage contact information of potential recruits, the Army isn't ready to move the personal information of its employees to a commercial service, says Information Week --public clouds just aren't secure enough.

   See the paradox here?  Everyone wants to use less energy and the most efficient way to do that is to move to a cloud environment. But current data center and cloud environments are, for the most part, wayyy behind the curve to satisfy demanding corporate and government needs for secure services.   Like it or not, meeting the full promise of energy savings through outsourcing will require data centers to step up their information security certifications as a first step -- and may require the creation of new standards in the future.

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