The Security Industry Association (SIA), a trade group representing over 1,600 security solution providers, has launched a Data Center Advisory Board to address the sector’s rapidly evolving security needs as AI fuels unprecedented expansion. Microsoft senior director and security architect Jim Black, who oversees security strategies for Microsoft’s data centers, will chair the new board.
Black, who has worked with SIA for over 20 years on design standards, access control, and certification standards, said the scale and speed of current activity have elevated data centers into a clearly defined piece of critical infrastructure.
“The incredible, exponential scaling and explosion of this rocket ship that is the data center industry over the last couple of years, driven by some of the more newsworthy events around AI and some of the massive investments that are being made, has just raised the visibility externally to the rest of the world,” Black told Data Center Knowledge. “This is no longer a niche subset and is really transitioning to a defined critical infrastructure. You can’t copy and paste what you might do for other critical infrastructures and have it work for the data center ecosystem.”
Data centers have existed since the beginning of the computing era, and security concerns have accompanied them since the first facilities were built. However, the AI-driven infrastructure boom has pushed data centers from a specialized technology segment into a form of critical infrastructure. This visibility has attracted attention from regulators, legislators, and the broader public in ways the industry has not previously experienced. As operators compress timelines to meet demand, gaps in contracts, design decisions, and shared responsibilities can widen.
“People are going so much faster than they’ve ever gone before in building it, making it happen, deploying it,” Black said. “It’s going faster and faster and faster, and that means less time to iron out these issues.”
He added: “When you have commercial agreements that are negotiated and signed on a weekend or done very quickly, this is where the risks associated with those gaps in understanding just get amplified.”
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