Consonus , a US data-center/co-location facility provider that prides itself on its " highly secure and reliable data centers ", suffered a rather embarrassing physical security incident at one of its data centers on Saturday February 20th. An email from the Consonus data center manager to his customers indicates that an Inergen automated fire suppression system was accidentally triggered during a routine 6-monthly inspection of the fire system. This incident somehow damaged a large number of disks in the facility - I understand from other less reliable sources that as many as five hundred disks may have bitten the dust. Oops. The point of this blog posting is not to poke fun at Consonus, who have clearly invested heavily in state-of-the-art controls and appear to have a comprehensive approach to information security, but rather to indicate that control failure remains a risk that we should all consider, no matter how strong we believe our controls may be. In this inci...