Data Centres – Risk and Loss Prevention

Risk drivers

Data centres concentrate very high asset values in a small footprint in the form of servers, network equipment and redundant cooling and power supply systems. Unlike most other commercial properties, however, the primary concern at data centres is not property damage but business interruption: even a brief outage of cooling or uninterruptible power supply can cause data loss and downtime for numerous customers simultaneously. The dense cabling under raised floors and in cable risers also represents a substantial concealed fire load.

Protection measures

Key measures include a gaseous or oxygen-reduction extinguishing system suited to IT spaces rather than water-based systems, very early fire detection using aspirating smoke detectors, redundant cooling and power supply paths built to recognised availability classes, and strict separation of IT floor areas from ancillary rooms with a higher fire load such as storage or battery rooms. A data centre’s availability class largely determines the degree of redundancy required.

Insurance relevance

For property and business interruption cover of data centres, the duration of downtime after an event is often more significant than the pure replacement cost of the hardware, since customer contracts frequently include strict availability guarantees. Insurers reviewing the risk pay particular attention to the redundancy of critical supply paths and the suitability and maintenance of extinguishing systems for electronic equipment.