14 DAY TRIAL // Google is giving its users a rare glimpse into one of its data centers with a new video it released, to boast about the security and reliability measures it employs to ensure that its customers' data remains safe.
The company is notoriously secretive about its data centers so this video is one of the few chances most people will get to see what a Google data center looks like from the inside.
"At Google, we run a network of data centers that are built for scale and reliability. They’re also designed for security and data protection," Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager for Google Enterprise, wrote.
"For the 3 million businesses that have gone Google and the thousands more that join them every day, these features help ensure that their data is kept safe," he added.
"Many of you have been interested in visiting our data centers to see how we work to protect your data, but access to them is tightly restricted. Since we can’t give everyone a tour, we look for other ways to provide some visibility into these buildings," Swidler said.
"Today we’re sharing a video that highlights some of the capabilities in our data centers," he announced.
The video is seven minutes long and looks and sounds like a bad 90's corporate promotional video, but we're not in a position to be picky. If you get past the cheesy production, there is actually plenty of interesting stuff to see.
For example, Google's physical security measures of its data centers border on paranoia. While squads of highly trained mercenaries/hackers taking over computing centers make for great Hollywood plots, that's not how things happen in the real world. Still, it can't hurt to take an extra safety measure.
Google also takes several steps to ensure that user data doesn't leak out of a data center. Obsolete hard drives face a grizzly fate. The data is wiped and the drives are formatted and then checked to see if there's anything left on them. After that, they're crushed (impaled) on site and then run through a hard drive shredder leaving them, quite literally, in bits.
Why this sudden urge to show off its data center security is an unknown, maybe Amazon's ongoing 48-hours outage as something to do with it or maybe it's Facebook recent open-sourcing of its data center design.