All of us have to take precautions to keep our own or our customers' data safe. ever wondered what it must the problem be like when you scale it up to a Google-scale enterprise?

This video, which is part of a "The Story of Send", a presentation which looks at what happens to an email, reveals that data security is a major undertaking. It looks at the different types of safeguard in place at one of Google's data centers.

The range of measures include:

• physical barriers & perimeter fencing
• 24/7 security presence
• access control with badging and biometric identification
• local law enforcement response
• video monitoring and video analytics
• fire detection and suppression

In addition Google builds redundancy into its data storage with replication and uses file fragmentation and labelling that cannot be read by humans to further thwart the efforts of anyone who might attempt to steal data.

The video also shows "hard drive life cycle management" which in this case means the extreme destructive processes employed to ensure that nothing can be reconstructed once a hard drive is no longer used.

And these are just the technologies and processes Google is willing to reveal - according to the video there's more but they are secret.

Another video included in The Story of Send looks at a solution to the problem of keeping a data center cool. Forget fans on hard disk drives, in Finland Google uses seawater as part of its effort to be energy efficient.

There are plenty of other insights into Google's data centers in the Story of Send.

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