The Enemy Within : Disgruntled employees danger to data centre security

The management of staff access in and out of the data centre can sometimes appear onerous and even seem to hamper their ability to carry out day-to-day tasks.

Risk in the data centre is not limited to data theft. It comes in many other forms such as the inability to access or process data or the physical damage to the environment and it is a sad fact but the greatest risk comes from within.

Disgruntled employees are by far the most likely to cause material damage to the data centre or the data it holds.

Imagine a data centre with a structured cabling system and 10,000 ports – if a staff member were to move just one cable from one port to another, the effect could be monumental.  

Their actions could take the data centre off the air, and how long would it take to trace the cable that had been moved and put it back?  Of course, there are ways to minimise this risk using systems such as Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM), but in reality how many data centres have implemented this?  

Migration Solutions is the computer room and data centre specialist; providing independent, vendor-neutral services in Data Centre Build, Data Centre Consultancy, Data Centre Operations and Data Centre Migration. Tags: Physical Security, data centres