As data centers become more interconnected to support AI-driven workloads and sustainability goals, the definitions of cyber and operational resilience have fundamentally changed. They are no longer defined solely by hardware redundancy or dual power paths—it’s now about protecting systems where a single cyber incident can lead to physical disruption, create safety hazards, or cause catastrophic downtime.
Whether it’s a massive hyperscale campus or a distributed edge network, data centers are feeling pressure to move cybersecurity from the IT back office to a boardroom priority. This shift reflects a new reality: safeguarding CPS is essential to maintaining uptime, safety, and business continuity. To do this, operators need to adhere to four business imperatives that we will explain here and why they matter.
Protecting Data Center Uptime and Availability
In the data center world, uptime is crucial to day-to-day operations. A typical data center can consume megawatts of electricity per day, putting unprecedented power demands on them. This demand is only exacerbated by specific environmental controls that are needed for them to function reliably.
However, the operational technology (OT) that powers data centers often runs on outdated legacy systems that were built with efficiency in mind first. While this offers reliable resilience for uptime, it also can create issues because legacy tech is notoriously difficult to patch or update, as this would require extensive and costly downtime.
With downtime costs often exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, a traditional approach to security that is IT-centric is no longer sufficient.
The Business Impact
Modern resilience requires protecting cyber-physical systems integrity alongside traditional hardware. A breach in your building automation systems (BAS) or electrical power monitoring system (EPMS) can create havoc in a data center environment, especially if the breach is related to improper virtual network segmentation or insecure misconfigurations. A poorly segmented network, for example, exposes data centers to lateral movement from OT assets to the enterprise network, further exposing the data center to disruptive or damaging attacks.
The Path Forward
Establishing a CPS security program is now a strategic enabler for maintaining Uptime Institute Tier III and IV status. Automated asset discovery can inform which critical systems to prioritize for virtual segmentation, and continuous monitoring alerts to active threats that need immediate remediation. Proper segmentation is a key strategy, for example, to contain breaches or malware to particular segments, limiting the impact of lateral movement .
Meeting Compliance and Evolving Regulatory Standards
Compliance within data centers is complex given the array of digital and physical infrastructure required for operations to run smoothly. Frameworks such as ISO 27001 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework are mainstays for cybersecurity programs, outlining which security controls should be in place and how they should be implemented in order to identify and mitigate risks.
For OT, the IEC 62443 series of standards provides a similar framework for controls that follow internationally recognized standards, technical reports, and guidelines for securing industrial automation and control systems (IACS).
Some data centers must also comply with certain industry or international regulations such as the EU’s NIS2, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), among others. These activities are costly, and require strategic planning and procurement that may add some complexity for data centers as many operate as critical national infrastructure.
The Business Impact
New directives like the NIS2 and the soon-to-be implemented Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA) in the U.S. have strict incident reporting guidelines, often under tight deadlines of 72 hours or less. Six-figure fines are the norm for violations, and enforcement figures to be strict. Furthermore, high-stakes tenants in industries such as healthcare (HIPAA) and finance now propagate their strict security requirements down to the data center level.
The Path Forward
Security leaders must maintain an auditable trail of asset visibility, exposure management processes, secure remote access, and network policy enforcement to satisfy both regional regulators and contractual obligations.
Why Cyber Insurance is Now a Security Gatekeeper
This year, cyber insurance has become a primary gatekeeper for market access and trust.
The Business Impact
To qualify for coverage or reach a favorable premium tier, data center operators must provide auditable proof of zero trust controls that isolate risk. Carriers may demand that data centers enforce controls such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) on third-party and internal remote access, strict segmentation between OT and IT environments, continuous monitoring of industrial protocols, and logged, time-bound vendor remote access.
The Path Forward
A programmatic approach that streamlines zero trust controls and provides complete visibility ensures your organization isn't excluded from high-value partnerships or insurance coverage.
The specific zero trust controls to enforce include:
Identity-Driven Access: All access must be strictly role-based, time-bound, formally approved, fully logged, and continuously monitored. Even when access is approved, users can only reach the specific systems they are authorized to manage, ensuring strong structural segmentation
Elimination of Standing Privileges: Ensure there are no persistent vendor VPN tunnels quietly running in the background, no shared credentials, and no standing privileged access for vendors or engineers
Restricted Lateral Movement: There must be strong isolation between corporate IT networks and operational technology (OT) environments, ensuring that a compromise in one area cannot easily spread to the cyber-physical systems that control power and cooling
Mandatory Remote Access Expiration: Time-bound access expiration must be mandatory to prevent permissions from outliving their purpose
Operational Scalability in a Hypergrowth Market
The race to deploy AI-ready capacity has forced data centers to constantly expand through acquisitions and newly built facilities. Data centers provide the physical infrastructure via hardware (servers, networking, and storage) and power capabilities in order to host cloud providers’ on-demand resources and processing power that are used to train large language models and other AI capabilities without owning the hardware. These three are inextricably linked.
The Business Impact
Speed in getting new or acquired data centers up and running leads to enhanced revenue streams. Legacy cybersecurity structures, however, can create friction and risk that could impede uptime service-level agreements, and other data center business drivers.
As a result, in an industry defined by hypergrowth, mergers, and constant expansion, a modernized CPS protection platform provides the accurate asset and threat intelligence needed to scale.
This also addresses new risks to power availability. A hypergrowth data center market puts significant strains on public grids, resulting in many data centers supplying their own on-site power with distributed energy resources (DER) for local power generation. They need a strategy that protects all CPS realms (facility, rack, and power generation) in this unique operational environment.
The Path Forward
A CPS program provides the dynamic asset discovery needed to onboard new sites on day one of an acquisition without requiring immediate hardware deployment or planned downtime. A CPS program also supports mapping out operational processes in order to understand whether a device belongs to a power, cooling, or HVAC system.
Strengthening Business Resilience with CPS Protection
The first step is recognizing the unique pressures your facility faces to ensure data center availability. Those include:
Meeting uptime service-level agreements and obtaining uptime certifications
Meeting cyber insurance requirements in order to obtain proper levels of coverage in order to unlock market access
Complying with industry frameworks in order to meet regulatory mandates.
A programmatic approach to protecting CPS that is so crucial to uptime and reliability is a necessary step through a structured approach that combines people, process, and technology:
Define Governance
Establish clear ownership and a unified security language between IT and Engineering teams.
Establish Process
Develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) and risk assessment cadences that align with maintenance windows.
Operationalize Technology
Leverage a purpose-built CPS security platform that integrates visibility, exposure management, and threat detection into your existing workflows to drive measurable risk reduction.
Data center security is no longer an IT task—it is a business imperative. By synchronizing your people and aligning your processes, you can transform security from a technical hurdle into a strategic advantage.
