Google builds and maintains one of the world's foremost networks of data centers their design and Engineering approaches have created a large and highly scalable data center network over the next few minutes we're going to get an exclusive inside look at how Google works to secure and protect the data that is stored in their Data Centers inside of a Google data center there are thousands upon thousands of machines carrying out the business of Google and its customers the machines are custombuilt by Google to their own specifications Google builds thousands of servers every year but all of
them are built exclusively to run in these data centers only the necessary operating system services and Hardware are installed this helps provide a Computing environment that is much less prone to vulnerabilities access to Google data centers is tightly controlled it's in Google's policy not to allow Public tours or site visits security Personnel are on duty 24 hours a day 7 days a week Google data centers are watched by a comprehensive set of video monitoring cameras once granted access to the facility authorized personnel must check in at a reception area Google takes great measures to protect
his customer's data and the security and protection of that data is Paramount Google's customer data is stored in multiple locations to help ensure reliability the files that store the data are given random file names and are not stored in clear text so they're not humanly readable for each hard drive that is received in one of our data centers Google rigorously Tracks its location and status when a hard drive fails or begins to exhibit performance problems it's brought to this area or it's reformatted and retested if the hard drive does not pass these tests it's removed
from the rotation the data on the hard drive is then overwritten to help ensure that no customer data remains on it the data override is then verified with a complete disre this process helps ensure that there's no trace of customer data remaining on the hard drive for hard drives that have reached the end of their life Google has a destruction process that is designed to further ensure that none of the data on that drive can ever be accessed the drives are destroyed in a multi-step process one device that is used to destroy old hard drives
is known as The Crusher and is shown here a steel piston is pushed through the center of the drive and the platters are deformed making them unreadable another step in the process is the drive Shredder shown here as you can see no one will be likely to get any of Google's customers data from these drives after the crushing process the remains are sent to recycling centers Google maintains an extra backup of the data in the data center that is stored on these tapes shown here this provides a level of redundancy to help Safeguard its customer
data Google data centers are connected to the internet via high-speed fiber optic cable in each data center there are multiple redundant connections to protect against the possibility of a failure from a single connection in addition to operating data centers designed for security and data protection Google data centers are designed for sustainability and Energy Efficiency this is Central to Google's commitment to being a carbon neutral company in 2009 Google announced that its data centers currently met Energy Efficiency levels that the US Environmental Protection Agency projected only the most state-of-the-art data centers would possibly meet by the
year 2011