Where Does Your Data Physically Sit?

“The cloud” and “our data centre” are both answers that sound sufficient and are not. Every hosting arrangement eventually resolves to a specific machine in a specific building with specific power behind it, and the questions worth asking are about that building.

First, establish what you are actually buying

Three arrangements get sold using overlapping language:

• Colocation — your hardware, their building, power and cooling. You own the failure of the machine; they own the failure of the room.
• Managed hosting / dedicated server — their hardware, their building, and some agreed level of their administration on top.
• Cloud — capacity on shared infrastructure, usually in a region rather than a named building.

Confusing these makes the responsibility boundary vague, and a vague boundary is discovered during the incident. Ask the supplier to write down, in one sentence each, what they fix and what you fix.

Name the building

For colocation and dedicated hosting, ask which data centre, by name. Then:

Rating. Ask for the tier or equivalent classification, and whether the facility is certified by an independent body or self-described. “Tier 3 standard” and “Tier III certified” are different claims, and the first one costs nothing to say.

Power redundancy. The distinction that matters is between N+1 — one spare component, so any single failure is survivable — and 2N, a fully duplicated path. Ask which applies to the UPS and the generators, and whether your rack is fed from A and B feeds or from one.

Generator autonomy. Ask how many hours of fuel are held on site and whether there is a standing refuelling contract. A generator with four hours of fuel and no contract is a four-hour generator.

Cooling and fire suppression. Ask what happens to your rack when a cooling unit fails, and what the suppression system will do to running equipment if it discharges.

Who can touch the machine

Physical access is part of security, and it is easy to check:

• What identification is required to reach the floor, and is your authorised-person list yours to maintain?
• Is access logged, and can you see the log for your own cage or rack?
• Is there remote hands, what does it cost, and how is an instruction authenticated? A remote-hands service that acts on an unverified phone call is a way into your infrastructure.

Data residency, if it applies to you

If a contract, a regulator or a client requires that data stay in Malaysia, that requirement has to reach the actual storage location, including backups and any replica. It is common for the primary to be local and a replica or backup target to be offshore by default.

Get the residency commitment into the contract with the location named, and ask specifically where backups land. A supplier who will commit for the primary but not for the backup has told you where the data is.

Backup is not the same as continuity

Two numbers turn “we have backups” into something you can plan around:

• RPO — how much data you can afford to lose, which sets backup frequency.
• RTO — how long you can afford to be down, which sets the restore method.

Then ask the only question that validates either: when was a restore last tested, and can I see the result? Backups that have never been restored are an assumption, not a control. A supplier who tests restores will be pleased to be asked.

Also confirm the backup is not in the same failure domain as the primary. A backup on a second server in the same rack, on the same power feed, protects against exactly one kind of failure.

Connectivity and the exit

Ask how many carriers serve the facility and whether your service uses more than one. A well-built data centre with a single carrier into your cabinet is a single point of failure with excellent air conditioning.

And ask about exit before you enter: what does it cost to get your data out, in what format, over how long, and does bandwidth for the migration get charged? Egress cost is the quiet lock-in in hosting, and the time to discover the number is while you still have a choice.

The short list

Name the building. Get the rating and who certified it. N+1 or 2N, on both UPS and generators. Fuel hours and a refuelling contract. Physical access logs you can see. Residency for primary and backups. RPO, RTO, and the date of the last tested restore. Carrier diversity. Exit cost.

Nine answers. A supplier who does this for a living has them ready.