Can your datacenter compete?
Dec 18th, 2024 by Jesper Kråkhede
After my tour of a Microsoft datacenter, an honest question for management: Can your own datacenter compete?
Let´s look at the orders of magnitude. I can´t give exact figures for any company, but the powers of ten tell the story.
Microsoft has for many years said that it invests more than a billion dollars a year in security. In 2021 it announced 20 billion dollars over five years. And in its latest report on the Secure Future Initiative, it describes security work equivalent to tens of thousands of full time engineers. That is security investment on the order of billions of dollars per year, spread over millions of customers.
A typical mid sized company spends perhaps a few hundred thousand to a few million euro per year on IT security in total. The share that goes to physical security, monitoring and operation of its own datacenter is a fraction of that. So we are comparing something in the range of a hundred thousand to a million euro, with something in the range of a billion. Four orders of magnitude.
You don´t need guards, biometrics, metal detectors, cameras on every rack and a 24/7 security operations team for one server room. But the attackers don´t care what you can afford. They use the same tools against you as against everyone else.
That doesn´t mean everything should move to the cloud tomorrow. There are good reasons to keep some things on-premises: latency, regulation, OT. But the decision should be based on the real comparison, not on the feeling that ‘our own’ is safer.
Ask your IT department one question: what would it cost us to protect our datacenter at the same level? The answer is usually the end of the discussion.