Daniel
Bizo
Andy
Lawrence
Jacqueline
Davis
Uptime Institute’s annual survey, now in its eleventh year, is the most comprehensive, longest-running study of its kind in the data center sector. The findings reveal significant growth but also increasing complexity and challenges for owners and…
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
Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2021
Operators’ expectations for artificial intelligence fall
Most new technologies go through a hype cycle: A spark of interest and early investment is followed by a surge of hype, then a crash of expectations as reality sets in. Only over time and a period of work, absorption and adjustment does the…
Sheltered Harbor — a corporate IT survival model?
The financial services industry has developed a certifiable methodology designed to help banks recover from the complete loss of all IT systems for an extended period. Is this a blueprint for improving corporate resiliency?
The pandemic’s impact on digital infrastructure
The pandemic has accelerated some long-term trends toward greater use of digital services, remote working and remote operation. Overall, costs have been pushed up, but other impacts are less clear — some are even counter-intuitive. Many…
The COVID outage paradox
In the 12 months from early March 2020 to April 2021, COVID-19 made a big impact on how and where IT was used. This had a surprising — and in some ways paradoxical — impact on IT service availability and the number and severity of outages recorded…
The impact of cloud outages is growing
Cloud, hosted and many other internet-based services and workloads are designed to operate with very low failure rates. Large (at-scale) cloud and IT service providers use an array of software and data management tools, strategies and services to…
Pandemic has driven up data center costs
As the pandemic began to make an impact in early 2020, it became clear that data center operators were going to have to invest more if they were to provide the services on which their customers were increasingly reliant. Short-term needs included…
Annual outage analysis 2021
Avoiding downtime remains a top priority for all managers of critical infrastructure. But as technology changes, and as the demands placed on IT change, so do the types, frequency and impacts of outages, as well as the best practices in outage…
Fire frequency
The catastrophic fire that occurred at OVHcloud’s SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France (see Note 93, The OVHcloud data center fire) has led many operators to question their vulnerability to fires.Fires at data centers are a constant concern, but…
The OVHcloud data center fire
The fire that destroyed a data center (and damaged others) at the OVHcloud facility in Strasbourg, France, on March 10-11, 2021, has raised a multitude of questions from concerned data center operators and customers around the world. Chief among…
Extreme weather affects nearly half of data centers
Recent extreme weather-related events in the US (the big freeze in Texas, fires on the west coast) have once again highlighted the need for data center operators to reassess their risks in the face of climate change. The topic is discussed in depth…
Extreme cold — a neglected threat to availability?
In Uptime Institute’s recent report on preparing for the extreme effects of climate change (The gathering storm: Climate change and data center resiliency), there were over a dozen references to the dangers of extremely hot weather, which can…
Network problems causing ever more outages
Power failures have always been one of the top causes of serious IT service outages. The loss of power to a data center can be devastating, and its consequences have fully justified the huge expense and effort that go into preventing such events.But…
Sustainability: More challenging, more transparent
Through 2021 and beyond, the world will begin to recover from its acute crisis — COVID-19 — and will turn its attention to other matters. Few if any of these issues will be as important as climate change, a chronic condition that will become more…
Accountability – the "new” imperative
Outsourcing the requirement to own and operate data center capacity is the cornerstone of many digital transformation strategies, with almost every large enterprise spreading their workloads across their own data centers, colocation sites and public…