Data center fire risk
Risk of total or partial destruction of a site by fire, worsened by the density of electrical equipment and the difficulty of extinguishing it without further damage.
A data center fire destroys all or part of a site, and the peril is worsened by three things: the density of live electrical equipment, the large quantity of cabling and flammable material, and the extinguishing itself, which can do further damage. Water ruins electronics, and some gas-based suppression systems are not enough to contain a fire that has already taken hold in a dense server room. Compartmentalization between rooms and buildings sets the real scale of the loss: a fire contained to one room causes only a partial loss, while spread across a whole building it can amount to a total site loss. Beyond the physical damage, service is cut for every hosted client. The loss is therefore both property damage and business interruption, magnified if the site hosts many clients across varied sectors. For insurers the peril sits alongside classic industrial property risks, with one twist: the insured value is concentrated on a small footprint, and the clients' digital dependency far exceeds the physical value of the building.
On March 10, 2021, a fire destroyed the SBG2 building at OVHcloud's Strasbourg site and damaged neighboring buildings, cutting access to millions of hosted websites and causing total data loss for clients with no offsite backup.
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