Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Compliance requirements and rising risk standards have raised the stakes for data centre security. Without assurance that facilities can resist disruption and protect data, organisations face increased exposure to audit failure, downtime, and reputational damage. For executives and auditors, data centre security is part of wider governance and risk management. Oversight means confirming that physical safeguards, environmental systems, and compliance frameworks are in place and can be trusted.

Managing IT for Witherslack Group does keep me up at night sometimes. Keeping our data secure is an ongoing challenge. When I say our data is sensitive, I mean a breach could genuinely destroy lives. We care for some of the UK's most vulnerable children: young people who have experienced sexual exploitation, kids whose parents cannot know their location, children from backgrounds most people could not imagine.

Since the publication of the inaugural AI Sector Study in 2022, the UK’s AI ecosystem has grown to include more than 5,800 companies – an 85% increase over the past two years. AI revenue is now £23.9 billion, and the sector employs more than 86,000 people. To put that in context, it’s bigger than the UK gambling sector – on both counts. Digital infrastructure is the foundation of this new economy.

Pulsant recently pledged to slash its carbon and other emissions as part of a thorough review of the entire business. Our goal is to halve all emissions by 2030 and achieve Net Zero by 2050 at the latest. This will require a continued and sustained effort. To be effective we will need to understand our connections to bring all our suppliers, vendors, clients, and of course our people, with us. Our ambition will be validated in accordance with the Science Based Targets Initiatives’ Net Zero Standard.

“As the UK’s hybrid cloud specialist we are already helping clients reduce their environmental impact by ensuring the most efficient use of their technology infrastructure. I am really proud that this pledge to shift to Net Zero takes us, and our clients, to the next stage on this vital journey.” – Rob Coupland, CEO, Pulsant Pulsant is promising to achieve Net Zero by 2050, and earlier, if possible.

Securing a data centre requires multiple layers of protection. Physical access controls, surveillance, and network safeguards reinforce one another to prevent disruption. As estates expand and workloads increase, those measures have to scale. If they don’t, gaps appear in both resilience and compliance. A data centre security solution must therefore protect infrastructure day to day while adapting to future requirements. Pulsant delivers this through an integrated framework.

The impact of the AWS outage has reminded many businesses of the risk for businesses that rely heavily on centralised cloud infrastructure, especially when so many essential services are concentrated in a single region. But at the wider industry level, this is also a warning around the widespread lack of contingency planning for cloud failures. Reactive response must give way to strategically planned disaster recovery protocols that engender a resilient cloud market.