Flexential’s Tampa and Fort Lauderdale data centers were fortunate not to have been directly impacted by Hurricane Helene as the storm barreled through the South last month. However, its COO Ryan Mallory told IT Brew that the company prepared its Florida data centers for the worst all the same.

For Flexential, a data center colocation service provider with more than 40 sites in 19 markets nationwide, making sure its facilities are functional is a full-time job. Mallory told IT Brew that the company’s Florida-based data centers are home to the computing infrastructure and digital data of several healthcare systems, making operation during inclement weather crucial.

“[I]f we go down, an ambulance may not know where to respond to somebody that’s been injured…or somebody who’s been critically injured in the hospital can’t get their health records,” Mallory said.

The calm before the storm. While Flexential’s Sunshine State data centers are built to withstand up to category-five hurricanes, preparation for incoming storms is still a grand event. Mallory, who spends all of hurricane season monitoring the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane tracker to see what’s “brewing,” told IT Brew that he spotted activity related to Helene in late September and quickly alerted his operations team.

“[O]n that Monday, we activated our ‘go team,’” Mallory said.

Read the rest here.—BM

Chris Pierson, CEO at BlackCloak, has dedicated much of his “digital executive protection” firm’s efforts to protecting a breach point that, at times, lives beyond corporate walls and firewalls. Pierson says today’s cyberattackers bypass high-security corporate environments—the castles—by exploiting less-defended personal email accounts.

“If the castle walls are high, don’t attack the king and queen there. Go attack them down at the summer cottage, right? You attack them where there are less controls, but the same target,” Pierson told IT Brew.

Pierson, along with other cybersecurity pros who spoke with IT Brew, gathered a checklist of controls to avoid turning personal compromises into corporate ones.

What’s at stake. A threat actor with access to an exec’s personal email has potential access to shared corporate documents, calendar entries, and conversations between colleagues.

Read more here.—BH

Tier time—a data center provider is facing federal fraud charges for misrepresenting his business to secure a deal from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) worth nearly $11 million.

Deepak Jain, the CEO of an unnamed data center company, was indicted Oct. 15 on charges that he fraudulently claimed his company operated a certified Tier IV data center. Such a certification is issued by the Uptime Institute, a digital infrastructure management institution. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Jain created a separate entity, the deceptively-named Uptime Council, which then “certified” his company at Tier IV, the highest level.

“Jain orchestrated a yearslong scheme to defraud the SEC by falsely certifying that his company’s data center met the highest rating level, when the actual rating did not satisfy the SEC contract,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri said in a statement.

Uptime Institute’s tier classifications for data centers are useful for understanding what facility is best suited to the needs of a company or service. As Uptime details in a breakdown of the system, the system helps to “explain the infrastructure required for data center operations.”

Keep reading here.—EH