A terrifying thought hit me Monday while watching this flyover video of Apple’s new $1 billion 500,000 square foot data center in North Carolina.
Forget sophisticated digital attacks on our infrastructure; there is absolutely nothing preventing extreme anti-government thugs like Joe Stack from flying planes into the data centers that increasingly are synonymous with computing, the Internet, the cloud and our lives.Data centers are famous for their tight access restrictions, but as we learned in last week’s IRS attack, an aerial attack doesn’t care about access cards and finger print scans.
Just consider this:
- An accidental outage at a Texas data center can grind parts of the Internet to a halt;
- The U.S. is not prepared for a sophisticated digital attack, never mind thugs in planes;
- Just today, part of Google’s cloud failed.
Hitting a few key data centers could be catastrophic. No wonder companies don’t like sharing information about these campuses.
Scariest part is I can’t possibly be the first person to have this thought.