Data centres on the frontline: Building resilience in a war environment

The role of data centre has shifted from purely technical facilities to vital strategic assets, shaped by an evolving wartime risk landscape. As the backbone of digital economies, data centres support cloud services, financial systems, government platforms, critical national infrastructure, and increasingly AI ecosystems. In this context, data centre resilience can no longer be planned solely around conventional risks such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or equipment failures.

Wartime conditions introduce an expanded threat landscape that combines kinetic risks, cyber‑physical attacks, infrastructure interdependencies, and prolonged supply chain disruptions, all of which can simultaneously impact power availability, network connectivity, cooling systems, employee access, and recovery capabilities.

Key highlights of the report

Structural hardening and compartmentation

Structural hardening and compartmentation are no longer optional, as they limit the blast radius, secondary damage, and reduce scope of outages during extreme events
Self‑sufficiency by design

Self‑sufficiency becomes a critical design requirement, spanning across power generation, cooling, fuel autonomy, local control systems, and extended isolation capability
Resilient and independent connectivity

Connectivity strategies must prioritise physical path diversity and independence. Ensuring communications survive damage to regional fibre routes or carrier facilities
Governance, contracts and insurance readiness

Governance, contractual and insurance models must be revisited, as wartime exclusions and regulatory shifts directly affect response and recovery strategies
Conflict‑aware fire protection and safety

Fire protection and safety systems must be designed for conflict scenarios, reducing unintended shutdowns and enabling faster recovery
Data sovereignty and regulatory control

Data sovereignty becomes a critical consideration, as wartime conditions can trigger new localisation mandates, export controls, and cross‑border data restrictions that influence architecture, workload placement, and recovery strategies
Managing indirect and cascading failures

Resilience planning must address indirect and cascading failures, including loss of power, telecommunications, logistics access, and supporting services
Survivability as a core design objective

Survivability must become a primary design objective, ensuring data centres can sustain operations and recover in stages even when multiple systems are affected simultaneously

This marks a decisive shift from uptime optimised architectures to data centres engineered for endurance, survivability, and sustained operation under stress.