T 2.82 Poor planning of the archive system location

Due to the sensitivity of the stored data and the very long retention periods, storage and archive systems must meet high requirements in terms of the quality of data storage. The choice of location for the storage and archive systems has a major influence on the storage quality.

The following potential security problems must be taken into account in this context:

• Unsatisfactory climate conditions
  
  A temperature that is too high or too low or excessive humidity may cause technical components in storage and archive systems to malfunction and damage storage and archiving media. These effects are aggravated by frequent fluctuations in the climate conditions. Similar climatic loads may be caused by secondary damage. An example of this would be the vapour which can be emitted from walls following a fire in an adjacent room.
• Inadequate physical protection
  
  Inadequate protection of the storage or archive systems against unauthorised site and data access may encourage deliberate actions (for example theft, tampering, or sabotage).
• Inadequate protection against other environmental influences
  
  Other environmental influences (vibration or exposure to large amounts of dust, for example) may also cause damage to technical components of the archive system or to storage media. This is especially exasperating when the damaging influences were foreseeable, e.g. when construction work is done.

Example:

Because the central IT area was installed close to the production plants, occasional vibrations occur. As a result, the technical components of the archive system, which is also operated in the IT area, constantly malfunction.