At the same time, the security, resilience, and reliable and efficient management of such infrastructures are becoming increasingly relevant. These new challenges were the topics of a discussion about secure high speed data transfer and photonics-based data centres, hosted at Fraunhofer IZM on December 8, 2015. The attendees discussed a range of issues in the field, covering everything from tap-proof communication lines to Tb/s data connections or innovative data centre and network architectures.