Rose Weinschenk

Rose Weinschenk

Rose is a Research Associate at Uptime Institute covering staffing and education in data centers. Her background includes psychology research, with a focus on ethics.

Latest Research

11 Jun 2025
Cybersecurity and the cost of human error

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

20 May 2025
Error-proof emergency communications for facility teams

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.

2 May 2025
Annual outage analysis 2025

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.

28 Apr 2025
Mentorships: practical strategies for retaining new employees

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.

31 Mar 2025
Sustainability requirements rise as climate risks intensify

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…

27 Mar 2025
Publicly reported outages see increase in deliberate attacks

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.

19 Mar 2025
Are data center workforce initiatives effective?

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.

4 Mar 2025
Deconstructing NIMBY: how to avoid planning conflicts

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

28 Feb 2025
AI adds to rising demand for capacity

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…

14 Feb 2025
Cloud repatriation is overstated

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…

20 Nov 2024
Extended reality offers new training capabilities

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.

14 Nov 2024
Operators struggle to retain staff and fill vacant positions

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…

30 Oct 2024
AI adoption in data centers: an insight into job displacement

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

25 Sep 2024
Bridging the skills gap: lessons from China

Examining staffing trends in China's data centers could provide insights into how US and European data center teams can expand their talent pipeline and address workforce shortages caused by an aging population.

21 Aug 2024
Building trust: working with AI-based tools

Trust in AI as a tool for data center operations has declined sharply in the past three years. It is possible to control for the factors that drive mistrust - and see better outcomes when employees interact with AI-based systems.