Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2023

The Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2023 reveals an industry that continues to grow in importance and scale, but must overcome a widening range of challenges. Operators face ever stricter regulations and pressure to reduce energy use, along with persistent staffing and supply chain issues. New technologies present a promising way forward — but are expensive and lack standardization and scalability. While investments in efficiency and resiliency are starting to pay off for many organizations, progress is slow with a growing proportion of workloads being outsourced.

KEY POINTS

• Average global power usage effectiveness (PUE) levels have remained flat for four years. Further improvements in PUE levels will require a wave of investment.
• The share of workloads placed in corporate, on-premises facilities has fallen below half — and is expected to shrink further — as more organizations opt for a hybrid approach to IT.
• More than half (55%) of operators say they have had an outage at their site in the past three years. This continues a trend of steady improvement.
• About 8% of the data center workforce are women. In the US, this rate is below that of mining and construction.
• Enterprise operators say data security is the biggest impediment to moving mission-critical workloads to the public cloud.
• Server rack densities are climbing — steadily, but slowly. Most operators do not have any racks beyond 20 kW.
• AI in data center facilities will be adopted cautiously. Operators are distrustful of its ability to make reliable operational decisions.