The COVID-19 pandemic will bring about some long-term strategic changes to the design, management and day-to-day operations of data centers and mission-critical infrastructure. Some changes would have happened anyway, but more slowly; others were les...
Data center managers have gone to some lengths to avoid transmission of the COVID-19 virus in their facilities. Fortunately, many factors help keep transmission rates low in data centers: few staff are required; most jobs do not require close physica...
In a recent analysis (Pandemic is causing some outages and slowdowns), we considered a question that Uptime Institute has been asked many times since COVID-19 lockdowns began: Has the pandemic caused any increase in outages? The question arose becaus...
The tenth Uptime Institute annual survey is the largest and most comprehensive research study of its kind in the data center sector. The findings discussed in this report reveal what operators around the world are thinking, doing and planning in the ...
During the current COVID-19 crisis, enterprise dependency on cloud platform providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and on software as a service (Salesforce, Zoom, Teams) has increased. Operators report booming demand,...
This advisory report aims to help operators of critical infrastructure facilities prepare for the impact of COVID-19. The steps discussed will also help operators develop strategies and procedures for future pandemics.
To date, the critical infrastructure industry has mostly managed effectively with reduced staff, deferred maintenance, social distancing and new patterns of demand. While there have been some serious incidents and outages directly related to the pand...
To date, media coverage of the impact of COVID-19 and the lockdowns has been largely laudatory. There have been few high profile or serious outages (perhaps fewer than normal) and for the most part, internet traffic flow analysis shows that a sudden ...
On March 12, 2020, Uptime Institute held its second roundtable about the impact of the COVID-19 virus on data center operations and potential responses to its spread. A Note covering the topics discussed in the first roundtable is available here. Ove...
One of the findings of Uptime Institute’s recently published report Annual outage analysis 2020 is that the most serious categories of outages — those that cause a significant disruption in services — are becoming more severe and more costly. This is...
Despite years of discussion, warnings and strict regulations in some countries, hot work remains a contentious issue in the data center industry. Hot work is the practice of working on energized electrical circuits (voltage limits differ regionally) ...
What are the main causes of outages? Which industries suffer most? Why? What is the impact? Uptime Institute presents and analyzes annualized outage data for 2016-2019, pinpointing trends, causes and impacts.
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, holistic...
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 ...
The full report Ten data center industry trends in 2020 is available to Uptime Intelligence subscribers here.
Andy Lawrence
Intelligence Team