US mayors call for data protection at the edge

The US Council of Mayors has urged the federal government to require the use of fault-tolerant solutions and the use of secure and resilient architecture by all data storage and data centre solution provider contractors.

At the 87th annual meeting for the official organisation representing US cities with populations of at least 30,000, participants passed a resolution seeking to improve data protection at the network edge.

The mayors resolved to urge the US administration and Congress to encourage fault-tolerant solutions necessary for ensuring the resilience, redundancy and reliability of data systems to maintain continuity of service.

These can include uninterruptible power supplies, redundant backup power solutions, water-free cooling systems and the construction of data centres with nonflammable materials.

Any contractors providing data storage with any private data centre services should follow the power supply protection standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the resolution states.

According to the resolution, technologies including the IoT, connected devices, autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, graphic computing, smart grids, supercomputing, quantum computing are becoming increasingly vital to the economy.

As this trend accelerates, the cost of downtime or system failure is growing considerably. The resolution notes that 59% of the top US companies experience at least 1.6 hours per week downtime costing US$46 million per year.

The hourly cost of downtime ranges from US$636,000 for health care to US$2.6 million in the energy sector.

Even latency can be expensive, with Amazon estimating that every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. This equates to a page load slowdown of just one second potentially costing US$1.6 billion in lost sales per year.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/chinnarach

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