The 15th edition of the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey highlights the experiences and strategies of data center owners and operators in the areas of resiliency, sustainability, efficiency, staffing, cloud and AI.

In this session, we explored how these principles of data center operations were applied to support, sustain, and enhance the skills of people supporting the infrastructure.

Human error is an increasingly exploited weakness by cyberattackers, leading to data center security breaches and greater risk for enterprises and operators.

Tensions between team members of different ranks or departments can inhibit effective communication in a data center, putting uptime at risk. This can be avoided by adopting proven communication protocols from other mission-critical industries.

The prevention of outages has always been a top priority for data center owners and operators - but outages do occur. This report analyzes recent Uptime Institute data on IT and data center outages: their causes, costs and consequences.

Data center owners and operators find it challenging to retain qualified staff. Research-backed strategies can provide solutions for building stronger mentorship programs and improved staff retention.

Most data center organizations conduct climate change/ weather-related resiliency assessments in 2025 — even if it is not a formal requirement. Additionally, many enterprises demand these assessments from their cloud and colocation service…

Major and damaging publicly reported outages are increasingly likely to be due to a deliberate attack - whether cyber or physical, according to Uptime Intelligence public outage data for 2024.

Data shows that cuts to workforce initiatives and mentorships had little effect on the proportion of new hires in 2024. Owners and operators can consider reassessing and restructuring these programs.

Understanding the principles of human behavior and how they relate to community engagement and siting strategies can reduce potential conflict between data centers and local residents

Capacities continue to grow for both enterprises and colocation providers, with colocation companies expanding more rapidly. Growth in general-purpose IT remains the single greatest driver of rising data center demand overall, but the need to…

The main reason enterprises are repatriating workloads from the cloud to their own data centers is due to spiraling costs. However, most enterprises are continuing to use several public clouds alongside on-premises facilities in a hybrid IT strategy…

New augmented reality and virtual reality technologies can provide effective training capabilities for data center staff but are not yet a complete substitute for in-person training.

Most operators report losing staff in the last year. Of the employees who left, 41% did so in their first two years with the company. The most likely subset of employees to leave are those in junior and mid-level operations positions. Operators are…

Many speculate that AI and automation might replace humans in data center jobs but there is little evidence to support this line of thought. The data center industry has characteristics that researchers believe may protect against worker displacement