Working in Shadow

The shadow government may be coming soon to a data center near you. The "government continuity" effort, launched to address new worst-case scenarios suggested by Sept. 11, is looking for secure space in the suburbs of Washington, according to an article this week in the Washington Business Journal (free registration required). The Bush administration doesn't speak about the location of these facilities, for obvious reasons. But whether driven by the shadow government or other security needs, landlords with tech space in Northern Virginia say federal interest has been on the uptick.

"We've found a great amount of interest from government agencies," Hossein Fateh, a principal in Dupont Fabros, said at the recent IMN conference in New York. "These agencies are taking up hundreds of thousands of square feet, especially in Northern Virginia." But they're not always forthcoming about their plans for the facilities. "I introduce myself and say 'Hi, I'm Hossein Fateh from Dupont Fabros.' They shake your hand and say 'Hi, I'm Bob.' "

Government security agencies are generally seeking stand-alone buildings that can house workers as well as equipment. In most cases, sites need to comply with the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) code, a National Security Agency standard for buildings that handle sensitive government data or intelligence. A key emphasis of the guidelines is the ability to impose extraordinary controls on building access.

Then there's the "blast radius" issue. For many agencies, the site location process is driven by the cold calculus of post-Sept. 11 homeland security. To address concerns about terrorists gaining nuclear capabilities, sources say sensitive government operations are seeking to be at least 25 miles away from downtown Washington.

Even before Sept. 11, several developers announced plans for huge complexes of secure space in Northern Virginia. Fortress Development's plans for its CyberPlex@Dulles development call for a gradual buildout that could eventually include 860,000 square feet of data center space and 2.5 million square feet of SCIF-ready office space. US DataPort, meanwhile, plans to eventually build up to 3.7 million square feet of data center space on a 188-acre parcel in Prince William County, dubbed Virginia Gateway.

Whether the new realities will get these ambitious projects off the drawing board and fill them with tenants remains to be seen.