Why Data Center Security is the backbone of compliance in 2025

Inadequate data center security isn’t just an invitation for data loss, it causes immense regulatory fines, public scrutiny, and audit failures. Learn why robust cloud data security is one of the biggest make or break reputation factors, and how your enterprises’ data security professionals can become your biggest compliance cheerleaders.

The role of Data Center Security for Compliance

A data center is a physical third-party location that stores the information that enterprise companies hold. Businesses use data centers to reduce the risk of a breach, but also to simply promote strong workflows with good data integrity and fast performance.

Data Centers include security features like encryption, access controls, and disaster recovery plans. Each of these plays a part in keeping the data integrity intact and away from prying eyes, locking it against physical and cybersecurity threats.

In fact, it’s having all the security features in one place that increases the protection of stored or archived data, because these measures all contribute to improving operational resilience. The theory behind this is that threats are always going to exist, so organizations should plan for the impacts and ensure that they can continue to operate as ‘normally’ as possible to reduce the risks and consequences.

Beyond just being good for business, secure data storage for financial services aids compliance with regulations like DORA- the Digital Operational Resilience Act. And data center security can also go a long way in proving compliance with various other regulations, including:

• FINRA rule 3110: requires firms to establish and maintain a system to supervise the activities of their associated persons. By establishing written supervisory procedures (WSPs) around data center security, firms can create internal controls and improve security
• SEC rule 17a-4: firms can use data centers to meet the requirement to “preserve the records exclusively in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable format”
• GDPR: including defining whether you are a data controller or data processor (or, more commonly in this case, both!) and meeting the technical, audit, and risk-based security requirements

But not every data center is made equal, and without benchmarking competitors, firms may experience challenges in their cloud data security solutions. 

Challenges in Securing Data Centers for Compliance

Most often, organizations struggle with insider threats, supply chain attacks, and phishing. Other than cyber threats, data centers also struggle with maintaining compliance and ensuring consistent uptime.

Insider threats

Insider threats are a common hazard, largely due to the scale of access that employees tend to get once they are vetted and approved.

Access controls, including restrictions based on seniority and need are a good solution to simple mistakes. But it’s not a foolproof fix on its own, because intentional attacks can also happen, like the real-life cases at Yahoo where an employee stole 57,000 pages of trade secrets from the data center.

So ultimately, working with software that records and monitors employee activity and data changes should be paired with access controls for more concrete protection. For the very best practices, adopt WORM (write once, read many) compliance to ensure that data cannot be edited, deleted or changed once it enters the data center.

Phishing

Cyberattacks are not only threats to profiting businesses, they also affect government agencies, charities, and community organizations.

In May 2025, cyberattackers sent very targeted phishing emails to education staff in Edinburgh, Scotland. In these emails, the attackers impersonated internal members of staff, inviting them to an online meeting. But if the meeting link wasn’t genuine, it was malware, aimed at getting the personal data of over 2500 school children from their data center.

Fortunately, the staff were vigilant and became suspicious of the email, reporting it before any damage was done. Regular training is the best way to instill vigilance into staff​​ and keep the data center and other organizational operations from the hands of attackers.

Supply chain attacks

While it can be expensive and time-consuming to secure your entire supply chain, any vulnerabilities here can leave your secure data storage vulnerable to an attack.

Between March and August 2024, a security firm uncovered at least 15 separate victims of a credentials harvesting attack at advanced manufacturing firms. Cybercriminals impersonated their software supplier Microsoft, starting by sending a very targeted email prompting a login, which appears to be from the huge brand name. If the victims click on the link, they are redirected to a spoofed website and encouraged to type in their details, which the attackers then have access to.

Vetting suppliers during the onboarding process, including performing a full risk assessment, is the first step in preventing supply chain attacks. However, companies should also set firm policies to only work with approved suppliers within their vendor management system to ensure that the risks are not realized.

Maintaining Compliance

The challenge largely comes from trying to manage multi-tenant environments, where multiple clients’ information is stored in the same place, although this is logically isolated, meaning they cannot see each other’s information. However, this also presents a challenge to SOC2 and other regulatory compliance.

Effectively overcoming this requires firms to consider their engineering architecture and prioritizing legal obligations before fulfilling individual client requests. This also supports global data residency, ensuring that customers can have their data stored where they need it, and you meet the local regulatory requirements.

How Global Relay’s Data Center Security Ensures Compliance

Global Relay’s Data Archive helps you to enrich, store, and manage your data. Meeting global standards helps to ensure regulatory compliance and gives clients top performance, with fast and reliable access to the data they need.

The Data Center offers unparalleled security, with military-grade dual encryption. In fact, our hardware security modules (HSMs) are the gold standard, ensuring no one can access your data encryption keys – even our systems administrators. We are also the only archiving solution that constantly scans data to ensure its integrity, from import through final disposition.

SOC 2-compliance is automatically covered by us, leaving your teams to focus on what really matters: from eDiscovery to threat management. And with extensive disaster recovery planning, we help you mitigate the risks of things going wrong.

Prioritizing data center security

The security of any data center lies at the heart of its function, as without strong security practices, the potential for breaches, and thus financial, regulatory and reputational damage, is immense.

Ensure that your business is protected by taking the right measures, including:

• access controls
• activity monitoring with WORM compliance
• regular cybersecurity training and
• scenario testing and response planning
• encryption and regulatory compliance

And if all of that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. But in 2025, this is what it takes to defend organizations against security threats.

Team up with Global Relay to access a data center that follows each of these security practices and more to protect your information from getting into the wrong hands. Speak to a specialist to learn more.

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