RECAP | ROUNDTABLE | COVID-19 and data center readines. Lessons learned and the future for our teams

Participants at an April 16, 2020, Inside Track roundtable expressed cautious optimism that their efforts at limiting the effects of the novel coronavirus on their facilities are succeeding. In addition, most participants noted that they had begun planning for returning to normal operations. Amber Villegas-Williamson, Uptime Institute consultant, joined the discussion.
At the outset of the discussion, participants exchanged details about how they had prepared to combat the virus. They had all pared down to skeleton staffs, developed methods of supporting social isolation, created procedures for substituting for workers who might become infected, deferred maintenance and canceled non-essential operations.
Despite all these precautions, two participants had been able to confirm that data center personnel had contracted COVID-19, with one having exhibited symptoms while on site. Co-workers brought this situation to management’s attention: the employee was sent home and asked to self-isolate. In another case, a third-party employee became symptomatic just a few days after visiting the data center. The timing was bad as the facility had just been disinfected.
Fortunately, there were few consequences as the data center operators were able to track staff movements, which limited the follow-up effort. In these situations, agreed all roundtable participants, follow up efforts are a matter of judgment. At least some cleaning and disinfection were done in both cases, and management was pressed into operations roles for a short while in one instance.
At the same time, at least two participants were continuing at least some new construction. One of the two, a large colocation provider, felt that coronavirus concerns affected construction and operations environments very differently, perhaps because so many third parties are part of the construction process.
Villegas-Williamson asked participants if they could imagine any of their COVID-19 precautions becoming a part of regular operations. There were no objections when one participant listed several possible new procedures, including tighter SLA checking. However, one participant suggested that temperature and wellness checks would not be allowed in his environment (a health care provider) due to legal requirements.
Additionally, two participants sharply disagreed about whether management would seek to reduce staff levels, in the aftermath of the pandemic, as there had been no evidence of outages. Both agreed that reduced staffing was already causing maintenance backlogs, but only one thought that these backlogs would be convincing to managements looking to reduce costs.
Deferred maintenance was also identified as a growing problem that could hamper efforts to restore normal operations. It was noted that contractors and third parties required to support these efforts would likely be in short supply for an extended period of time after full operations resume. No one could say for sure how major vendors would prioritize the work. Still, this conversation confirmed a snap poll that indicated that 80% of attendees had considered how to resume normal operations. As of yet, no one had fully thought through the process, perhaps because the pandemic is still a daily threat.