Control for data centres and colocation

Physical path governance for colocation and data centres.

Colocation facilities share power, cooling, fibre and management planes across many tenants. One compromised environment can become a launchpad into neighbouring cages. Control removes the shared paths that attackers rely on.

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The challenge

Shared infrastructure should not mean shared risk.

Power, cooling, connectivity and management planes can stay shared. The attack surface between tenants does not have to be.

Cross-connects between tenants open for the approved window of work and close automatically. No path persists beyond the business need.
Access to a tenant cage or its equipment ties to a named, verified individual with the right authority. Shared remote-hands credentials are eliminated.
Each tenant sits on its own physical fabric, and an incident can be contained by severing the physical path.

Challenge 1

Flat cross-connects.

Legacy cross-connects remain live indefinitely, creating persistent paths between customer environments that bypass normal network controls.

Answered byRelay

Challenge 2

Shared management plane.

Provider remote hands, out-of-band management and smart hands tools often reach every cage from a single console.

Answered byLock

Challenge 3

Tenant-to-tenant lateral movement.

A breach in one tenant estate can traverse shared infrastructure and reach another customer through a path that should never have existed.

Answered byIsolate and Firebreak

Module highlights

Where each module is deployed,
and what it does there.

A shared provider edge, a shared switching fabric and individual customer cages. Choose a module to see where it is deployed and what it does there.

P0Internet and WANUntrusted traffic terminates at the provider edge

P1Provider edge DMZBorder routers and IXP, the provider-controlled demarcation point

P2Shared fabricCore switches and provider firewall. Not a trusted zone for tenants

ACage ATenant routers, servers and storage

BCage BOne tenant’s environment

CCage COne tenant’s environment

MProvider management DMZRemote hands, out-of-band console, smart hands. Reaches every cage

SShared facilitiesPower, cooling and physical security. No data path

Offline Secure Storage®Facility recovery vault

Where it sits

Between the internet and the provider edge, and on every link from the shared fabric to a cage.

What it does there

The provider can physically sever the internet boundary or any tenant boundary, so an incident is contained by removing the path itself.

Provider configuration backups, tenant isolation evidence, audit logs and the recovery sets you need after a facility incident are held in Offline Secure Storage®.

7 of 9: Control modules in a colocation design
Layer 1: Tenant isolation, not only VLANs or ACLs
Every change: Cross-connect and remote-hands activity recorded
One hall: Piloted first, then facility-wide

Schedule a demo Open Blueprint CP-04

Scenario

A compromised tenant reaches its neighbour.

An illustrative scenario in a London colocation facility.

What happened

1A managed service provider (MSP) tenant in a London colocation facility is compromised through a stolen VPN credential.
2The attacker discovers live cross-connects left open after a completed data migration six months earlier.
3They move laterally through the provider’s shared switching fabric into the cage of a financial services tenant.
4The provider faces contractual liability, reputational damage and a regulator asking why one tenant could reach another.

“We thought each cage was isolated because the VLANs were different. Then we discovered a cross-connect had been left live for months.”Illustrative

With Control

Relaywould have closed the cross-connect at the end of the migration window.
Unlinkwould have removed the persistent trust relationship.
Firebreakwould have physically severed the path between the shared fabric and the customer cage.

Capabilities

What you get with every deployment.

Six things every colocation deployment delivers, for the provider and for every tenant.

Isolation

Tenant isolation at Layer 1

Customer environments are separated by physical path control, not only VLANs or ACLs.

Shared infrastructure

Shared infrastructure protection

Power, cooling, connectivity and management planes remain shared, but the attack surface is not. The provider’s core infrastructure is protected from a single tenant compromise.

Cross-connects

Cross-connect lifecycle governance

Cross-connects are requested, approved, opened, audited and automatically closed. No cross-connect lives beyond its approved purpose.

Maintenance

Scheduled maintenance windows

Remote hands and engineering access open only during agreed windows, with full identity verification and session logging.

Evidence

Audit-ready isolation evidence

Every physical path change is recorded, giving providers and tenants defensible evidence for SLAs, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and customer assurance questionnaires.

Offboarding

Offboarding without residual trust

When a tenant leaves or a project ends, Unlink removes the cross-connects, access rights and inherited trust.

Relevant Blueprints

Deployment patterns that apply here.

Each Control Blueprint is a proven pattern for one outcome, assembled from the Control modules.

Control Blueprints

Four Blueprints apply here: physical segmentation, third-party access, active breach containment and proving compliance through control.

Explore the Blueprints Read CP-04

Firebreak®

Where a deployment calls for a Layer 1 cut on the internet boundary or a tenant boundary, Firebreak® delivers it. Firebreak® is manufactured by Firevault.

See the Firebreak® range FV-Firebreak module

CP-04

Enforce Physical Segmentation

Segmentation should not just be logical. It should be physically enforceable.

Read CP-04

CP-03

Control Third-Party Access

Give third parties access without giving them a permanent doorway.

Read CP-03

CP-02

Contain Active Breaches

When prevention fails, containment must be physical, immediate and provable.

Read CP-02

CP-06

Prove Compliance Through Control

Compliance becomes stronger when control can be demonstrated, not just documented.

Read CP-06

Adoption guide

One hall first, then the whole facility.

1
Cross-connect inventory

Catalogue every live cross-connect, remote-hands access path and management-plane route between the fabric and the cages.
2
Tenant isolation architecture

Map Control modules to the provider’s physical topology, with isolated fabrics per cage.
3
Pilot with one hall

Deploy Control in a single data hall or cage row first.
4
Facility-wide go-live

Extend path governance across all halls and integrate audit logs into the compliance workflow.

Grounded in ISO 27001 Annex A.13, PCI DSS v4 network segmentation guidance, SOC 2 CC6.1 and ENISA data centre security guidance. Control can help support each of them.

Questions

What providers ask before a pilot

Each tenant gets a physical boundary, and every path change is recorded. Isolation becomes something you can evidence to a tenant, an auditor or an insurer, rather than a configuration you describe.

Control is mapped to the facility’s existing physical topology first, then piloted in one hall or cage row without disrupting existing tenants. The design conversation identifies any changes before anything is installed.

Yes, through an approved request. Relay opens the cross-connect for the approved purpose and window, closes it when the window ends, and the change is recorded like any other.

Unlink removes the cross-connects, remote-hands access rights and inherited trust relationships that would otherwise persist for years.

All questions

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A different environment?

From demo to live.

We will walk through your cross-connects, management plane and cages, and show where each module would sit.

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