It's an open question at what point we'll start seeing small fiesty startups that want to sell you a privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof. The tech to do it is probably far ahead of the regulatory regime to own and operate autonomous small radar+SAM batteries.

It will require some involvement of state, but it is plausible, that critical infrastructure will be required to have this covered and certain big, licensed private contractors may be able to operate air defense systems on such sites (do you smell the money and lobbying effort?).

Also this may influence the design of such data centers. A drone that a paramilitary group can build is not very sophisticated and won’t carry big payloads. Put an outer concrete shell or some better passive defense, and maybe that will be enough.

As a result of some of my work only slightly related to telecom/internet infrastructure, I happened to get on the marketing lists for about six different Chinese companies that will gladly sell you a full size Shahed-136 clone complete with 2 stroke petrol motor. I wouldn't say that small paramilitaries being only able to fly a 5-10kg max size quadcopter with a munition on it into a datacenter is the limit of possible future capabilities. These things are cheaply made in fiberglass molds and look to be dead simple. They're already showing demo videos of them flying around with very low cost ardupilot capable flight controllers.

They even advertise the airframe and motor packages on Instagram....

Well, what an interesting time we are living in…

In a scenario were data centres in China, the US or France are getting blown up you're in WW3 and your food delivery service no longer matters.

Just co-located datacenter next to a military base

Just run your app on three fast servers in your office.

Yes, spend 10-100x more on 24x7 IT support for it, fiber from two different providers and take care of physical security of the server room. And when there‘s fire, you still need a cloud backup.

> privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof

Already here: https://vishkipvo.ru/

It heavily depends on "what kind of DC". A lot of current DCs are not really well protected against a lot of known threats - and that's just a design tradeoff.

High value data is already protected a bit better (or at least should be - the usual trend, management gets lazy when nothing blows up). I'm old enough to have sat in the meetings for "so, apparently a plane crashing into one or more of our locations is a viable risk now" - and a DC hardened for "somebody tries to land a 747 on that thing" should also survive a small drone with a bit of explosives.

While for the younger ones the "we lose several availability zones within days" is a new thing now - it really isn't. We were planning for that back then as well, just that we didn't call it "availability zone" or "cloud" yet.