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Protecting your data center requires attention to detail at numerous levels. While your IT team is likely enhancing security against the type of cyber attacks that have been grabbing headlines, it’s important to examine your physical location for security gaps.

Take a look at the following best practices for building up security at your data center facility.

Conduct regular audits. Whether or not your company undergoes an external audit, your team should commit to conducting your own audits to determine any areas of the data center facility that could be vulnerable. As

To see the public vs. private cloud infographic, scroll to the bottom of this blog post. 

“The public cloud is a veritable data war zone,” writes Sophos, a tech security firm, in their latest cloud security report.

For years, the debate on public vs. private cloud has rivaled that of politics, with fierce advocates on both sides. Security experts, however, consistently fall in the pro-private camp.

Let’s dig into why, keeping in mind that behind every data breach there’s someone saying “I thought we were secure.”

First, some definitions:

A public cloud is one that’s

With about half of China’s 1.357 billion population connected to the Internet, it’s no surprise it’s among the countries expressing grave concerns about data center efficiency. Worse yet, many data centers in that country haven’t kept pace with technology that would minimize their environmental footprint.

Beijing, China, which has one of the highest pollution levels in the world, recently announced a ban that would keep any data center with a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.5 or above from continuing its operations, according to Environment 360, a publication of the Yale

Innovations for data centers, which consume massive amounts of natural resources to operate, have often focused on efficiencies to lessen their environmental footprint. While those innovations are leading to decreased energy consumption, the government recently released a report that tries to quantify just how much water the nation’s data centers are using.

According to DataCenterKnowledge.com, the study primarily focused on energy consumption at data centers. However, it also took into account the electricity that’s generated as part of the water’s function in powering and cooling data centers.

Here are some findings in

This should come as no surprise – With the increased popularity of the cloud, cyber attacks have followed in its wake, with Sophos reporting a 45 percent increase in cyber attacks in the cloud during 2015. It’s been a steadily alarming trend. Two years ago, Alert Logic’s Cloud Security Report noted that brute force attacks on cloud environments had spiked to impact 44 percent of its customers, up from 30 percent in 2013.

In response to the growing threats, spending on information security is climbing, with the research company Gartner predicting

When it comes to choosing a cloud services vendor, 73 percent of companies rank security and data protection as their top concerns when choosing from among their options, according to a recent Tech Pro Research survey.

Industry cloud services are specifically designed for the challenges of a particular business sector, such as healthcare.

The survey also revealed that 36 percent of the respondents had already adopted cloud services for their industry. Also, another 16 percent stated that they had plans to adopt industry-specific cloud services within the next 12 months, while 23

With the continual drive to minimize costs and energy usage of data centers, Google recently gave us a hint of what could prove to be the future of data center cooling. Artificial intelligence.

The industry already has been effectively reducing energy consumption with innovative technology like evaporative air, cool aisle/hot aisle containment and chilled water systems to replace traditional cooling systems. And those innovations appear to becoming more mainstream.

However, DeepMind, which has primarily been recognized for using artificial intelligence to win games against humans, has shown that it can successfully address

Recent cyberattacks once again demonstrated that they can happen to any company at any time. Shortly before a British teenager was identified as one of the culprits of a cyber attack on Florida-based SeaWorld, two educational institutions, a state health agency, and a grocery store chain in California all announced being victims of data breaches.

In the California cyber attacks, the health records and personal information of more than 1,000 patients were compromised — leading the Palm Beach County Health Department to urge those people to take measures to obtain free

Concerns about data centers demanding a larger share of energy have been unfounded, as a new report shows that innovations in the industry have led to a promising stabilization in energy usage.

Although the United States is seeing an increasing number of data centers, they are more energy-efficient than models of the past, according to the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As a result, their collective energy consumption has grown less than previously anticipated.

Based on the study’s results, data centers consumed about 70 billion kWh in 2014 — about

There’s no denying that cyberattacks represent the No. 1 threat to governments, companies and individuals around the world. Experts are predicting we’ll spend trillions globally to counter that threat.

However, there’s another threat to our infrastructure that demands attention. That threat is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could lead to extended blackouts for millions of Americans. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article called “The Threat We’re Not Ready For, an EMP from a solar storm or a nuclear device could be catastrophic. Worse yet, we’re nowhere near prepared for