Andy
Lawrence
Big IT outages are occurring with growing regularity, many with severe consequences. Executives, industry authorities and governments alike are responding with more rules, calls for more transparency and a more formal approach to end-to-end,…
Andy Lawrence
Andy is a founding member and the Executive Director of Research for Uptime Institute Intelligence, which analyzes and explains trends shaping the critical infrastructure industry. He has extensive experience analyzing developments in IT, emerging technologies, data centers and infrastructure, and advising companies on technical and business strategies.
alawrence@uptimeinstitute.com
Latest Research
Outages drive authorities and businesses to act
Surveillance capitalism and DCIM
In her book “Surveillance Capitalism,” Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff describes how some software and service providers have been collecting vast amounts of data, with the goal of tracking, anticipating, shaping and even controlling the behavior of…
Data centers without generators: The groundwork is being laid
In 2012, Microsoft announced that it planned to eliminate engine generators at its big data center campus in Quincy, Washington. Six years later the same group, with much the same aspirations, filed for permission to install 72 diesel generators,…
99 Red flags
One of the most widely cited metrics in the IT industry is for availability, expressed in the form of a number of nines: three nines for 99.9% availability (minutes of downtime per year), extending to six nines — 99.9999% — or even, very rarely,…
Outage reporting in financial services
In the movie “Mary Poppins,” Mr. Banks sings that a British bank must be run with precision, and that “Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools.” Otherwise, he warns, “Disorder! Chaos!” will ensue. One rule, introduced by the UK Financial…
Creeping criticality
Why do some industries and organizations suffer more serious, high profile outages than others?In a recent Uptime Intelligence Note, we considered a June 2019 report issued by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) on the IT resiliency of US…
Banking to cloud: Be more transparent
We recently discussed where enterprises are putting their workloads. In line with almost everyone’s research, Uptime has found a very strong move of workloads to the public cloud, much of which then ends up in running, wholly or in part, in…
Enterprise IT and the public cloud: What the numbers tell us
The spectacular growth of the public cloud has many drivers, only one of which is the deployment, redevelopment or migration of enterprise IT into the cloud. But many in the industry — data center builders and operators, hardware and software…
Is PUE really going up?
One of the more intriguing results of the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2019 concerned energy efficiency. For years, data centers have become ever more efficient, with power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratings across the industry …
Buying cloud at scale: Lessons from Lyft and Uber
When the ride-hailing company Lyft (a competitor to Uber) filed for its IPO (initial public offering) in March, one figure attracted particular attention in the mission-critical infrastructure industry: Lyft will pay Amazon Web Services (AWS) around…
Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2019
Are data centers getting more efficient? How are outages changing? Is rack density rising at last? What proportion of workloads run in the cloud? Which new architectures are being adopted? The results are in for the industry’s largest and most…
Recover heat, re-charge power
Recently I attended the Data Center Dynamics (DCD) Smart Energy conference in Stockholm. During a panel discussion on energy, data centers and innovation, David Hall (Senior Director of Technology Innovation for Equinix) made two…
The business case for Smart Energy is still in the making
Smart Energy is getting a lot of airplay in the data center world at present. New or planned products that fall under this broad banner include Energy-as-a-Service uninterruptible power supplies, software-defined power systems, and adaptable…
How to compare the severity of outages?
Avoiding outages is a big concern for any operator or service provider, especially one providing a business-critical service. But when an outage does occur, the business impact can vary from “barely noticeable” to “huge and expensive.” …
Annual outage analysis 2019
This report analyzes the causes and impacts of publicly recorded IT service and data center outages from 2016-2018.
