A visit to my law firm’s cloud

In my last post I looked at when your law firm’s cloud turns dark. I finished that post by stating that the management of the data centre had invited me on a tour of the data centre. This post will look at that visit.

George Blair from Denovo Business Intelligence and I had an early easy jet flight from Glasgow to the cloud – how else would we get to the cloud? 😉 The data centre is owned by Rise and is located in Gloucester. We had to fly to Bristol and take a bus, train and then car to Gloucester.

As expected ample security surrounded the centre with electronic gates and CCTV cameras. One thing that hadn’t occurred to me but was an obvious necessity was the generators to provide electricty in the event of a power cut. Another thing that strikes you is the amount of air conditioning units, all essential to cool the servers. Having seen pictures of data centres with row after row of black boxes with clean lines I was a bit surprised by the amountof cables on show: a spaghetti cable junction if ever there was one. However, the cables are obviously essential and having them at the front makes it easy for engineers to unplug and fix/replace individual servers (we actually saw this happen when in the data centre).

It became clear to me how safe my law firm’s data actually was in the data centre. If someone managed to break into the data centre (which would be a task and a half in itself) where would they start in identifying what server (of the countless ones there) to take? Compare this to someone breaking into my law firm’s own office (a much easier task) and identifying the server (only one to choose from) to uplift.

We met with and discussed matters with the management at Rise. They were most hospitable and helpful. I am confident that my law firm’s cloud is unlikely to turn dark again due to the measures that have been put in place by Rise to prevent an incident like that ever recurring. Having seen where my law firm’s data is stored and met those looking after it I am very happy indeed to entrust Rise to look after Inksters‘ data.

In this video Andy Burton, CEO Rise and Chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum, discusses the secret behind the cloud:-