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Lifeline Data Centers is excited to share that we are making serious headway on the construction of our new data center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which will be opened later this year. This new facility is especially significant, because it will be dubbed our new flagship data center and will also be one of the first – if not the first – EMP-ready commercial data centers in the world.

Lifeline purchased the former Target building on South Anthony Boulevard with the intention of transforming it into this new data center. Demolition

Just as consumers don’t have a high tolerance for glitches that make the lights go out or other utilities to crash, they will fully expect data center uptime to be around the 100 percent rate with the increasing emergence of connected devices at home and at work.

That’s what a speaker told attendees during the recent Dell World conference in Austin, Texas. “For data centers, the idea that you need to be perfect will not be far from the truth,” said practical futurist Michael Rogers. He went on to say that

Although reliability-centered maintenance is nothing new, progressive data centers are increasingly exploring this protocol when wanting to completely eliminate the possibility of failure. Commercial airlines and military operations have been trying to develop RCM since the 1970s, according to various reports. The commercial nuclear power industry followed shortly afterward.

Even Disney, with its millions of visitors relying on the amusement park for entertainment, turned to RCM protocols in 1997.

The appeal of RCM, when done right, is obvious, according to Lifeline Data Centers’ Rich Banta, who recently spoke at the 2016 Data

It appears that cybersecurity could soon be on the minds of nearly every single business executive out there. According to a recently released survey, 86 percent of executives are now expressing concerns about cyber threats and lack of data security — up from 69 percent in 2014. In the study of 1,409 CEOs polled, energy costs, tax burdens and speed of technological change also were listed among the top 10 threats to their organization’s growth in 2016.

The study by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed “there’s a general rise in concerns across a number

While it’s hard to estimate the cost of cybercrime, experts agree the number is massive, and on the rise.

“The global figure has been put at around $200 billion annually,” said Kurt Baumgarten, head of Information Security & Technology Management at Linedata in Boston, in an interview with Forbes. “Or, looking at it from the retail level, $670 million in associated costs through theft, time loss, identify theft, etc.”

For business leaders, the temptation is to look for threats of any kind as coming from external sources — people you don’t know

High tech + human touch = IT success.

Earlier this year, the 3.5-hour outage at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) raised a lot of eyebrows in the IT community. Opinions about the cause of this outage, including my own, came out of the woodwork despite official statements claiming “technical issues” following a software update. I have to ask: Would the NYSE really perform a software update on a production system first thing Wednesday morning?

While I can’t rule out a hack on the NYSE, the situation sparks another discussion: Was human

Meet the new rogue IT — a growing trend that may have already found its way into your organization.

Back in the day, “rogue IT” typically entailed departments building servers and putting them under their desks in an attempt to circumvent the IT department and all of the pesky security controls that came with IT-approved servers.

Often, those servers sat under a desk, inside a closet or back room — unpatched, unprotected, and non-compliant — for long stretches of time before finally being discovered.

Those were the good ol’ days, compared to the

If you’ve done any research on data centers, particularly colocation centers, you’ve likely come across Uptime Institute’s rating system — which have been guiding standards in the industry for more than 20 years.

The Institute awards Tier ratings ranging from I to IV based on a number of complex factors, with the Tier IV rating qualifying the data center as a “fault tolerant site infrastructure,” compared to a Tier I rating for a basic site infrastructure.

When seeking a colocation center, it’s important to understand these ratings as they can give you

Data breaches are serious and very real threats in today’s digital world, and no industry sectors are immune. In the medical sector alone, the cost of client data breach liability, expense, and settlements surpassed the same costs from medical malpractice. Securing data and minimizing the probability and impact of data breaches is at its core a risk-based endeavor.While many businesses have recognized the need for risk assessment and management, there is still a tendency to treat risk assessment and managements as “checkbox” exercises. For a risk management program to provide

In what is expected to be a steady series of steps to combat cyber attacks, the GSM Association recently released guidelines to address the looming security problems that could result from the growing Internet of Things (IoT) trend.

The guidelines could go a long way in governing how well so-called smart devices are designed and implemented to protect against breaches.

The GSMA, which is an association representing mobile operators, said the guidelines are designed to promote secure IoT development and deployment. The report, which already have been backed by major carriers like