Keeping the UK online through resilient data centre operations

Confidence in the resilience of the UK’s critical infrastructure is under strain among policymakers, regulators, and the operators who run it. In September 2024, the government formally designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, bringing them into the CNI framework and enabling additional support during major incidents.

Data centres keep payments, healthcare, transport, and public services online, yet the environment around them is getting tougher as cyber risk grows, electricity demand climbs, and the grid adapts to new generation and load patterns. The bar for continuity is higher, and the focus is on how operators keep control when conditions turn against them.

The expanding threat landscape

Cybersecurity remains a leading threat to data centre continuity today. As estates scale and become more distributed, the attack surface grows and everyday change carries more risk.

Resilience is further threatened by increasingly sophisticated techniques, including ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks. Meanwhile, the internal threat landscape is growing all the time, as employees inadvertently succumb to phishing attempts and disgruntled individuals deliberately compromise network security measures. The constant flow of software updates increases the chance that a misconfiguration or unpatched service becomes the door to disruption.

While cyber security is, and should be, high on the agenda of data centre operators, there are multiple other issues that are a threat to continuity. Grid interruptions still occur in some regions and can cascade when the backup chain falters, such as when a UPS does not hold or a generator fails to start.

Cooling systems are another frequent point of stress. Heatwaves, constrained water supply, and airflow issues can push temperatures up quickly. Even with redundancy, a combination of component failures or maintenance errors can quickly threaten uptime.

Rising digital demands on these key systems are adding to the threat to data centre continuity. AI and machine learning workloads depend on immense computational power, but aging systems were never designed to manage the consequent increased heat, density, and power output.

The risk to data centre continuity from threats like these is real. In March 2025, Nottingham City Council suffered a power failure at its Loxley House headquarters that took the council’s central data centre offline and disrupted phone lines and public-facing systems while recovery work was carried out. In April 2025, the University of Manchester’s SpiNNaker system was shut down after a cooling failure led to overheating.

To reduce the chance of such disruptions occurring and to mitigate their impact when they do, resilience -- and the network management technologies that enable it - needs to be central to data centre operations.

Building resilience for the future 

When gauging the systems and solutions they require to deliver this resilience, operators would be well advised to look to solutions that enable them to sustain service continuity even under the most difficult conditions. In this context, they should consider implementing network resilience tools to anchor their operations, including automated failover, path diversity, real-time monitoring, configuration management, and secure remote access.

As one example within this toolkit, Smart Out of Band management provides a dedicated pathway that operates completely independently of the primary network infrastructure. 

When a fault, misconfiguration or cyber event disrupts production traffic, this separate path preserves secure reachability so engineers can observe, diagnose, and recover devices without depending on the impaired network. Faulty equipment can be isolated, restarted, or safely powered down to prevent escalation while the broader estate continues to serve users. 

The same approach supports security response. Segments that show signs of compromise can be quarantined quickly, limiting lateral movement and reducing the window of exposure. Incorporating software-defined networking into data centre designs strengthens security and scalability and provides a flexible control plane that adapts to evolving workloads and network conditions.

For security, out-of-band networks give organisations the means to isolate and contain incidents quickly, including breaches or attacks, locking down the affected segment before an attack can spread. Isolation limits further damage and helps protect sensitive data elsewhere in the estate. It’s another way to reduce downtime and reinforce resilience.

Giving operators control of the network

Power availability in the UK and globally is becoming less predictable. The data centre industry cannot afford to rely on reactive measures when the continuity of critical services is at stake. Ageing infrastructure, rising digital demand, and more complex cyber threats mean resilience must be reinforced continuously.

Smart Out of Band management technology plays a vital role in strengthening that resilience. Alongside scalable, flexible, and secure network architectures, out-of-band keeps operators in control, even in the most difficult circumstances. By building resilience in and responding quickly to changing conditions, the sector can continue to support the critical services that the UK economy and society depend on.