It’s a sunny June day in southeast England. I’m riding alongside a quiet, rural highway that stretches during the Kent geographical region. The solar flashes thru breaks within the hedgerow, providing glimpses of verdant crop fields and outdated farmhouses.
Thick hawthorn and brambles make it tricky to look the 10ft excessive razor-wire fence that encloses a big grassy mound. You’d by no means suspect that 100ft underneath the bottom, a hi-tech cloud computing facility is whirring away, guarding essentially the most treasured commodity of our age: virtual records.
This subterranean records centre is positioned in a former nuclear bunker that used to be built within the early Nineteen Fifties as a command-and-control centre for the Royal Air Pressure’s radar community. You’ll nonetheless see the decaying concrete plinths that the radar dish as soon as sat upon. Staff stationed within the bunker would have carefully watched their displays for indicators of nuclear missile-carrying plane.
After the tip of the chilly conflict, the bunker used to be bought via a London-based web safety company to be used as an ultra-secure records centre. As of late, the website online is operated via the Cyberfort Staff, a cybersecurity products and services supplier.
The Cyberfort bunker is a forged prone mass of grass-covered concrete that emerges within the centre of the compound.
Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
I’m an anthropologist visiting the Cyberfort bunker as a part of my ethnographic analysis exploring practices of “extreme” records garage. My paintings specializes in anxieties of information loss and the trouble we take – or continuously overlook to take – to back-up our records.
As an object of anthropological enquiry, the bunkered records centre continues the traditional human observe of storing valuable relics in underground websites, just like the tumuli and burial mounds of our ancestors, the place equipment, silver, gold and different treasures have been interred.
The Cyberfort facility is one of the bunkers around the globe that experience now been repurposed as cloud garage areas. Former bomb shelters in China, derelict Soviet command-and-control centres in Kyiv and deserted Division of Protection bunkers throughout the USA have all been repackaged during the last 20 years as “future-proof” records garage websites.
I’ve controlled to safe permission to discuss with a few of these high-security websites as a part of my fieldwork, together with Pionen, a former defence refuge in Stockholm, Sweden, which has attracted substantial media pastime during the last 20 years as it seems like the hi-tech lair of a James Bond villain.
Many deserted mines and mountain caverns have additionally been re-engineered as virtual records repositories, such because the Mount10 AG complicated, which manufacturers itself because the “Swiss Fort Knox” and has buried its operations throughout the Swiss Alps. Chilly war-era knowledge control corporate Iron Mountain operates an underground records centre 10 mins from downtown Kansas Town and some other in a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
The Nationwide Library of Norway shops its virtual databanks in mountain vaults simply south of the Arctic Circle, whilst a Svalbard coal mine used to be reworked into an information garage website online via the information preservation corporate Piql. Referred to as the Arctic Global Archive (AWA), this subterranean records preservation facility is modelled at the within reach International Seed Vault.
Simply because the seeds preserved within the International Seed Vault promise to lend a hand re-build biodiversity within the aftermath of long run cave in, the digitised information saved within the AWA promise to lend a hand re-boot organisations after their cave in.
A diagram of the Mount 10 bunker in Switzerland.
Mount10, CC BY
Bunkers are architectural reflections of cultural anxieties. If nuclear bunkers as soon as reflected existential fears about atomic conflict, then lately’s records bunkers talk to the emergence of a brand new existential danger endemic to virtual society: the terrifying prospect of information loss.
Information, the brand new gold?
After parking my automobile, I display my ID to a big and muscular bald-headed guard squeezed into a safety sales space no longer a lot greater than a pay-phone field. He’s dressed in a black fleece with “Cyberfort” embroidered at the left aspect of the chest. He assessments my identify towards lately’s customer listing, nods, then pushes a button to retract the electrical gates.
I observe an open-air hall made from metal grating to the door of the reception development and press a buzzer. The door opens directly to the reception house: “Welcome to Cyberfort,” receptionist Laura Harper says cheerfully, sitting in the back of a table in entrance of a bulletproof window which faces the auto park. I hand her my passport, position my bag in probably the most lockers, and sit within the ready house.
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Giant-tech pundits have heralded records because the “new gold” – a metaphor made all of the extra shiny when records is saved in deserted mines. And because the purported financial and cultural price of information continues to develop, so too does the affect of information loss.
For people, the lack of virtual records could be a devastating revel in. If a private software must crash or be hacked or stolen and not using a fresh back-ups having been made, it may possibly imply the lack of treasured paintings or loved reminiscences. Maximum folks more than likely have a data-loss horror tale lets inform.
For governments, companies and companies, a critical records loss tournament – whether or not thru robbery, erasure or community failure – will have an important affect on operations and even lead to their cave in. The web products and services of high-profile firms like Jaguar and Marks & Spencer have not too long ago been impacted via large-scale cyber-attacks that experience left them suffering to function, with techniques shutdown and provide chains disrupted. However those firms had been relatively fortunate: quite a few organisations needed to completely shut down after main records loss occasions, such because the TravelEx ransomware assault in 2020, and the MediSecure and Nationwide Public Information breaches, each in 2024.
With the commercial and societal affect of information loss rising, some companies are turning to bunkers with the hope of warding off an information loss doomsday situation.
The concrete cloud
One of the vital first issues guests to the Cyberfort bunker stumble upon within the ready house is a 3ft cylinder of concrete inside of a pitcher show cupboard, showcasing the thickness of the information centre’s partitions. The brute materiality of the bunkered records centre stands in stark distinction to the fluffy metaphor of the “cloud”, which is continuously used to speak about on-line records garage.
Information centres, on occasion referred to as “server farms”, are the structures the place cloud records is saved. After we switch our records into the cloud, we’re moving it directly to servers in an information centre (therefore the meme “there is no cloud, just someone else’s computer”). Information centres usually take the type of windowless, warehouse-scale structures containing masses of servers (pizza box-shaped computer systems) saved in cupboards which are organized in aisles.
Those structures now attach such an out of this world vary of actions and utilities throughout govt, industry and society that any downtime will have main penalties. The United Kingdom govt has formally labeled records centres as forming a part of the rustic’s vital nationwide infrastructure – a transfer that still very easily allows the federal government to justify development many extra of those energy-guzzling amenities.
As I sit down considering the concrete truth of the cloud in Cyberfort’s ready house, the corporate’s leader virtual officer, Rob Arnold, emerges from a hall. It used to be Arnold who organized my discuss with, and we head for his place of work – thru a safety door with a biometric fingerprint lock – the place he talks me during the good judgment of the bunkered records centre.
“The problem with most above-ground data centres is they are often constructed quickly, and not built to withstand physical threats like strong winds, car bombs or server theft from breaking and entering.” Arnold says that “most people tend to think of the cyber-side of data security – hackers, viruses and cyber-attacks – which dangerously overlooks the physical side”.
Amid expanding geopolitical pressure, web infrastructure is now a high-value goal as “hybrid” or “cyber-physical” sabotage (when cyber-attacks are blended with bodily assaults) turns into an increasing number of commonplace.
The significance of bodily web safety has been highlighted via the conflict in Ukraine, the place drone moves and different assaults on virtual infrastructure have resulted in web shutdowns. Whilst actual information about the collection of records centres destroyed within the struggle stay scant, it’s been noticed that Russian assaults on native records centres in Ukraine have led many organisations emigrate their records to cloud amenities positioned out of doors of the struggle zone.
Bunkers enchantment to what Arnold calls “security-conscious” shoppers. He says: “It’s difficult to find a structure more secure than a bunker” – sooner than including drily: “The client might not survive the apocalypse, but their data will.”
Cyberfort specialises in serving regulated industries. Its buyer base comprises firms operating in defence, healthcare, finance and demanding infrastructure. “Our core offering focuses on providing secure, sovereign and compliant cloud and data-centre services,” Arnold explains in a well-rehearsed gross sales regimen. “We do more for our customers than just host systems – we protect their reputations.”
Arnold’s pitch is disrupted via a knock on the door. The pinnacle of safety (who I’m calling Richard Thomas right here) enters – a 6ft-tall ex-royal marine dressed in black shipment trousers, black struggle boots and a black Cyberfort-branded polo blouse. Thomas goes to turn me across the facility lately.
The bunker’s exterior armour-plated door.
Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
The doorway to the bunker is positioned up a brief get right of entry to highway. Engineered to resist the blast and radiation results of megaton-level thermonuclear detonations, this cloud garage bunker guarantees its shoppers that their records will live to tell the tale any eventuality.
On the armour-plated front door, Thomas faucets a passcode into the digital lock and swipes his card during the get right of entry to management device. Inside of, the air is cool and musty. Any other safety guard sits in a small room in the back of bulletproof plexiglass. He buzzes us thru a steel mantrap and we descend into the depths of the power by means of a metal staircase, our footsteps echoing on this cavernous house.
A full-height turnstile safety gate (mantrap) throughout the bunker.
Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
The heavy blast doorways and urban partitions of the bunker seem unusually at odds with the digital “walls” we usually go together with records safety: firewalls, anti-virus vaults, and spyware and adware and junk mail filters. In a similar fashion, the bunker’s army logics of enclosure and isolation appear relatively out of date when confronted with the transgressive virtual “flows” of networked records.
Alternatively, to push aside the bunkered records centre as simply an outdated piece of safety theatre is to put out of your mind the significance of bodily safety – lately and someday.
We continuously call to mind the web as an immaterial or airy realm that exists in an digital non-place. Metaphors just like the now retro-sounding our on-line world and, extra not too long ago, the cloud perpetuate this mind-set.
However the cloud is a subject material infrastructure composed of hundreds of miles of cables and rows upon rows of computing apparatus. It all the time “touches the ground” someplace, making it prone to a spread of non-cyber threats – from thieves breaking into records centres and stealing servers, to sun storms disrupting electric provides, or even to squirrels chewing thru cables.
A blast-proof door within the Cyberfort bunker, in the back of which lies the server room containing the virtual ‘gold’.
Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
If records centre products and services must move down, even for a couple of seconds, the commercial and societal affect may also be calamitous. Lately we’ve got observed this first-hand.
In July 2020, the 27-minute Cloudflare outage resulted in a 50% cave in in site visitors around the globe, disrupting main platforms like Discord, Shopify, Feedly and Politico. In June 2021, the Fastly outage left probably the most global’s maximum visited web sites totally inaccessible, together with Amazon, PayPal, Reddit, and the New York Occasions. In October 2021, Meta, which owns Fb, WhatsApp and Instagram, skilled an outage for a number of hours that affected hundreds of thousands of social media customers in addition to masses of companies.
Most likely the biggest web outage but happened in July 2024 when the CrowdStrike outage left supermarkets, medical doctors’ surgical procedures, pharmacies, airports, teach suppliers and banks (amongst different vital products and services) not able to function. This used to be described via some within the business as “one of the largest mass outages in IT history”.
Web structure now depends on one of these complicated and fragile ecosystem of interdependencies that main outages are getting larger and happening extra continuously. Downtime occasions will have an enduring monetary and reputational affect on records centre suppliers. Some makes an attempt to quantify the typical price of an unplanned records centre outage vary from US$9,000 to US$17,000 (about £12,500) according to minute.
The geographic location of an information centre could also be massively essential for records coverage laws, Thomas explains, as we make our means down a brightly lit hall. “Cyberfort’s facilities are all located in the UK, which gives our clients peace of mind, knowing they comply with data sovereignty laws.”
Information sovereignty laws topic records to the criminal and privateness requirements of the rustic through which it’s saved. This implies companies and organisations should watch out about the place on the planet their records is being relocated once they transfer it into the cloud. As an example, if a UK industry opts to retailer its records with a cloud supplier that makes use of records centres founded in the USA, then that records might be topic to US privateness requirements which don’t absolutely agree to UK requirements.
By contrast to early perceptions of the web as transcending house, removing nationwide borders and geopolitics, records sovereignty laws endow locality with renewed importance within the cloud period.
The survival of information in any respect prices
Against the tip of the hall, Thomas opens a big crimson blast-proof door – past which is a smaller air-tight door. Thomas waves his card in entrance of an e-reader, beginning an unlocking procedure: we’re about to go into probably the most server rooms.
“Get ready” he says, smiling, “it’s going to be cold and loud!” The door opens, liberating a hurry of chilly air. The server room is configured and calibrated for the only function of offering optimum prerequisites for records garage.
Like all pc, servers generate an enormous quantity of warmth when they’re operating, and should be saved in repeatedly air-conditioned rooms to verify they don’t overheat. If for any explanation why a server must crash or fail, it can result in the lack of a shopper’s treasured records. Information centre technicians paintings in high-pressure prerequisites the place any surprising server downtime may imply the tip in their task.
The server room at Cyberfort.
Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
To take a look at and ensure the servers run optimally, records centres depend on massive quantities of water and effort, which is able to considerably restrict the supply of those assets for the individuals who reside within the neighborhood of the structures.
A mean records centre consumes an estimated 200-terawatt hours of electrical energy every yr. That’s round 1% of general world electrical energy call for, which is greater than the nationwide calories intake of a few international locations. Many of those amenities are powered via non-renewable calories assets, and the information centre business is predicted to emit 2.5 billion lots of carbon dioxide via 2030.
As well as, to satisfy expectancies for “uninterruptible” carrier ranges, records centres depend on an array of fossil fuel-based back-up infrastructure – basically diesel turbines. Because of this, the Inexperienced Internet Basis – a non-profit organisation operating to decarbonise the web – has described the web as the sector’s greatest coal-powered system. Information centres also are noisy and feature grow to be websites of protest for native citizens focused on noise air pollution.
Amid hype and hypothesis about the upward thrust of AI, which is resulting in a increase within the building of energy-hungry records centres, the carbon footprint of the business is beneath expanding scrutiny. Prepared to spotlight Cyberfort’s efforts to deal with those problems, Thomas informs me that “environmental impact is a key consideration for Cyberfort, and we take our commitment to these issues very seriously”.
As we stroll down a chilly aisle of whirring servers, he explains that Cyberfort actively assets electrical energy from renewable calories provide chains, and makes use of what he calls a “closed loop” cooling infrastructure which consumes minimum contemporary water.
‘Like the pyramids’
After our stroll during the server room, we start to make our means out of the bunker, heading thru some other heavy-duty blast door. As we stroll down the hall, Thomas promotes the sturdiness of bunkers as an extra safety promoting level. Patting the chilly concrete wall with the palm of his hand, he says: “Bunkers are built to last, like the pyramids.”
Any other heavy responsibility blast door.
Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
Bunker students have lengthy famous that those structures are as a lot about time as they’re about house. Bunkers are designed to maintain and shipping their contents thru time, from an apocalyptic provide right into a secure long run.
Writers equivalent to Paul Virilio, W.G. Sebald and J.G. Ballard have been interested in the decaying bunkers of the second one global conflict and, like Thomas, when compared them with enduring megastructures that have outlived the civilisations that constructed them. In his 1975 guide Bunker Archaeology, Virilio famously when compared the deserted Nazi bunkers alongside the coast of France with “the Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures”.
The bunker’s sturdiness invitations us to take a long-term view of our personal records garage wishes, which is able to most effective build up over the process our lives.
For generation behemoths like Apple and Google, cloud garage is a key strategic street for long-term earnings expansion. Whilst the telephones, laptops and different virtual units they make have restricted lifespans, their cloud products and services be offering doubtlessly lifelong records garage. Apple and Google inspire us to without end hoard our records relatively than delete it, as a result of this locks us into their cloud subscription products and services, which grow to be an increasing number of pricey the extra garage we’d like.
Cloud hoarders
It is usually an increasing number of tricky to function off-cloud. Inner cupboard space on our virtual units is dwindling because the cloud turns into the default garage choice at the majority of virtual merchandise being evolved. Customers should pay a top rate if they would like greater than the elemental native garage on their computer or smartphone. Ports to permit expandable, native garage – equivalent to CD drives or SD card slots – also are being got rid of via tech producers.
Many shoppers merely use whichever cloud garage carrier is already pre-installed on their units – continuously those are neither the most affordable nor maximum safe choice. However when we dedicate to at least one supplier, it is extremely tricky to transport our records to some other if we would like a less expensive per 30 days garage fee, or just wish to transfer – this calls for making an investment in sufficient onerous drives on which to obtain the information from one cloud supplier and add it to some other. No longer everyone seems to be tech-savvy sufficient to try this.
Underground: throughout the Lefdal Mine Information Facilities in Norway.
Lefdal, CC BY-ND
In 2013, financial institution reforms in the United Kingdom presented a switching carrier which enabled customers to simply transfer their cash and bills to other banks, as a way to get right of entry to extra beneficial charges. Cloud migration products and services are to be had for companies, however till a cloud garage similar of the financial institution switching carrier is evolved for most of the people, many people are necessarily locked into whichever cloud supplier we’ve got been the usage of. If our records in reality is the brand new gold, possibly we must require cloud suppliers to supply incentives to deposit it with them.
Some suppliers now be offering “lifetime” cloud applications and not using a per 30 days or once a year bills and no inaction clause. Alternatively, the cloud marketplace is unstable, outlined via cycles of boom-and-bust, with suppliers and their records centres repeatedly rebranding, ultimate and relocating. On this panorama of mergers and acquisitions, there is not any be sure that lifetime cloud suppliers might be round lengthy sufficient to honour those guarantees.
As well as, the vast majority of client cloud suppliers these days most effective be offering a most of a couple of terabytes of garage. At some point, maximum folks will more than likely want much more than this, which might imply much more records centres (more or less 100 new records centres are set to be built in the United Kingdom by myself throughout the subsequent 5 years). We might also see extra bunkers being repurposed as records centres – whilst some suppliers, equivalent to Florida-based Information Safe haven, are bearing in mind development fully new bunker buildings from scratch to accommodate virtual records.
Resurfacing
Thomas and I arrive on the metal staircase main again as much as the out of doors global. The guard buzzes us again during the turnstile, and Thomas unlocks and opens the door. The daylight stings my eyes.
Again within the reception house, I thank Arnold and Thomas for my surreal travel into the depths of subterranean records garage. The Cyberfort records centre is a website online of utmost contrasts, the place the airy promise of the cloud jars with the concrete truth of the bunker.
Sitting in my automobile, I upload to my fieldnotes that the survival of information – whether or not entombed in bunkers or saved in “lifetime” cloud accounts – is sure to the churn of markets, and depends on the sturdiness of the infrastructure and organisations in the back of it.
Permanence, within the virtual age, is all the time provisional. One can’t lend a hand however believe long run archaeologists finding this bunker and rummaging during the unreadable stays of our misplaced virtual civilisation.
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