Security+ Exam Objectives 6.5

6.5 Explain the importance of environmental controls.

Designing, maintaining, and working in a secure and safe location is important for any company and its IT infrastructure. Managing electricity, ensuring the space stays free of dust, smoke, and debris, ensuring that proper conditioning is in place to maintain a suitable room temperature and humidity level, preventing accidents that may be caused by spilled liquids or food, avoiding strong magnetic fields, and other factors must all be taken into consideration. Environmental controls are just as important as proper security implementation. A system can be amazingly secure but if it is housed in an unsafe location, the security of the system does not much matter. A secure system is even safer, more secure, and protected at a location with 

proper environmental controls.

·   Fire suppression – Where there is electrical equipment, there is always a chance of a fire occurring. Fire suppression is very important to have in place, especially in the server, vault, or communication/data center of your infrastructure. Water and sprinkler-systems should never be used as a method for fire suppression when dealing with any type of hardware as water will ruin the equipment. Nowadays gas-based suppression systems are widely used as they do not cause harm to the equipment physically. However they may not be most ideal for those working with these set locations.

A very common type of equipment used for fire suppression is fire extinguishers. These should be present even if a fixed system is in place. It’s important that fire extinguishers are inspected on an annual basis and replaced as required

·   HVAC – HVAC management is mostly important for the health and condition of your most important hardware, though all hardware should be kept in mind. HVAC deals with both temperature and humidity levels within a set location. In the server or vault room, the temperature should be kept at or below 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Too high of a temperature can cause hardware to overheat which can cause all sorts of failures and system interruptions. Throughout the entire location humidity levels should stay within the 40-60% range to ensure that the air is not too dry or too moist. Low humidity can cause static electricity to accumulate and high humidity can lead to condensation which can bring harmful moisture to mission critical hardware.

·   Shielding – Shielding deals with the separation needed between network-communication cables along with power distribution cables. In most environments, these two cable types should be isolated and run in separate conduits. They should be shielded from each other to ensure that magnetic fields often created by power cables do not interfere with the network cables needed for communication purposes.

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