THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
It’s a sunny June day in southeast England. I’m driving along a quiet, rural road that stretches through the Kent countryside. The sun flashes through breaks in the hedgerow, offering glimpses of verdant crop fields and old farmhouses.
Thick hawthorn and brambles make it difficult to see the 10-foot-high razor-wire fence that encloses a large grassy mound. You’d never suspect that 100 feet beneath the ground, a high-tech cloud computing facility is whirring away, guarding the most valuable commodity of our age: digital data.
This subterranean data center is located in a former nuclear bunker that was constructed in the early 1950s as a command-and-control center for the Royal Air Force’s radar network. You can still see the decaying concrete plinths that the radar dish once sat upon. Personnel stationed in the bunker would have closely watched their screens for signs of nuclear-missile-carrying aircraft.
After the end of the Cold War, the bunker was purchased by a London-based internet security firm for use as an ultra-secure data center. Today, the site is operated by the Cyberfort Group, a cybersecurity services provider.
The Cyberfort bunker is a solid inclined mass of grass-covered concrete that emerges in the center of the compound. Photograph: Cyberfort/A.R.E. Taylor, CC BY
I’m an anthropologist visiting the Cyberfort bunker as part of my ethnographic research exploring practices of “extreme” data storage. My work focuses on anxieties of data loss and the effort we take—or often forget to take—to back up our data.
As an object of anthropological enquiry, the bunkered data center continues the ancient human practice of storing precious relics in underground sites, like the tumuli and burial mounds of our ancestors, where tools, silver, gold, and other treasures were interred.
The Cyberfort facility is one of many bunkers around the world that have now been repurposed as cloud storage spaces. Former bomb shelters in China, derelict Soviet command-and-control centers in Kyiv, and abandoned Department of Defense bunkers across the United States have all been repackaged over the last two decades as “future-proof” data storage sites.