I wonder if they have a Centurion?
The New Bunker Mentality
by Brian Alcorn
3:00 a.m. 14.Jan.99.PST
Cold wars come and cold wars go, but paranoia is forever.
The premillennial jitters and the hacker heebie-jeebies intersect at a windowless concrete monolith in Moses Lake, Washington, where a decommissioned North American Aerospace Defense Command missile command center has been fashioned into a safe house for corporations looking to protect their electronic data from saboteurs, disasters, or the wrath of a vengeful God.
You want security? How about firewalls -- real ones, with ferromagnetic shielding that can withstand a 10-megaton nuclear blast?
Since the end of the Cold War, companies have been buying up government-built, Armageddon-proof facilities to store critical data such as corporate tax records and medical charts. But now the online world has discovered that many of these installations are more than just big, ugly bunkers. They are big, ugly bunkers with nearly limitless data infrastructures.
The US firm Titan, owned by Pierman-Nicklaus Families, opened its converted command center for business Monday. It is the first of seven such "vault-within-a-vault" facilities the company plans to open in regions around the United States to help companies recover from data losses caused by fire, flood, evil competitors, terrorists, hackers,earthquakes, or the Y2K bug. Or global thermonuclear war, if it comes to that.
Besides physical safety - the facility is ringed by a barbed wire fence, all of its vaults are monitored by 24-hour security, and entering the building is as complicated as the opening scene of Get Smart - Titan offers electronic safety in the form of dedicated fiber-optic networks with scalable bandwidths of 155 megabits and up, satellite and microwave capabilities, and redundant systems. There are three different ways to put out a fire on the premises -- which begs the question of how a fire could start in all of that concrete and steel.
"It's important for us to be ultra-paranoid," said Mitch Gerdes, Titan
director of communications. "We understand those aren't bits and bytes going down the line. Those are dollars." A. L. Digital, a software company located in London, has opened a similar facility in the English countryside that was once a bunker used by the Royal Air Force as part of NATO's network of radar-monitoring stations. A. L. Digital director Adam Laurie admits such precautions might be overkill for most companies, but in the case of security, too much beats too little.
"Companies worry about Internet security much more than they do about physical security," Laurie said. "Sometimes you have a secure server sitting right next to a nonsecure server where anyone and his dog can walk in. This is, obviously, a very bad thing." Like Titan, A. L. Digital's facility is "enormously overspecified," Laurie said, with more bandwidth available than it can possibly use. He said the company bought the bunker in the first place as a natural extension of its own interests in Internet security, specifically open-protocol software. A. L. Digital developed the Apache-SSL software that lets companies add strong encryption to Apache servers.
"We ourselves were very worried about physical security because of the development work we were doing for our clients.... Basically, what we're offering is an extremely secure environment to do whatever you
want to do," Laurie said. "We have a staff here 24 hours, seven days
a week, where your secure server can sit in a secure room, and we look after it for you."
When Titan first looked into purchasing military installations for electronic-data storage about four years ago, chairman and CEO Putnam Pierman said he assumed the target market would be Fortune 500 companies that could afford the high-priced security. But now midsized companies are leasing vault space from Titan, thanks to a combination of falling prices for computer technology and awareness of the Y2K problem.
In fact, Pierman said, the millennium may be the best thing to ever happen to the data-security business. "The Y2K situation has been fortuitous in that it has brought attention to areas of system backup, security, and what you would do when it hits the fan, so to speak."
Buying military installations made sense to Titan because it sets the
bar absurdly high for competitors.
"There's no way you could build this today," Pierman said. "If it had
not been built at taxpayer expense, it would be prohibitively expensive to go into this kind of facility."
It is also enormously expensive to maintain, which is why the federal
government had been eager to unload the Moses Lake facility when Pierman came along two years ago with a plan.
Not surprisingly, both Titan and A. L. Digital are tight-lipped about
their client lists. The cost for their services ranges wildly depending on the client's needs, which might be anything from a glorified safety-deposit box to full-on data backup and security consultation.
wired.com
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