RECAP | ROUNDTABLE | COVID-19 and Data Center Readiness in EMEA – lessons learnt and the future for our teams

With participants from 9 countries across EMEA and North American joining us on the COVID-19 and Data Center Readiness in EMEA – lessons learnt and the future for our teams Roundtable, the discussion allowed all participants to really see what measures and procedures are being implemented outside of their country, but also to highlight that there are many commonalities globally in how our industry is responding.
To begin this Roundtable that looked at updates to the situation and how the future be changed, moderator Lizabeth Hood ran through some of the updates the Uptime Institute Intelligence team had included in their COVID-19 update report, including:

• Importance of Leadership – during this time leaders need to focus on their employee’s well-being, communicate effectively, ensure their own physical and mental health is not overlooked
• Recognition of those working in Digital and IT Infrastructure as key workers by Governments
• Safety and Staffing – Colocation facilities are limiting public access, placing extra burden on their staff to carry out remote services, and all Datacenters are creating separate work teams to limit cross-contamination.
This led into Fred Dickerman leading the participants to discuss what they are currently doing, challenges they are facing and what, if any, changes they see to the future of the industry.
When looking at Vendors coming on site, it is generally agreed by the participants that there now exists additional screening measures for all those coming on site, both from the Datacenter operators and from the Vendor companies themselves. Many Vendor companies are requesting that Datacenter mangers confirm that within the team there have been no COVID-19 cases, or contact with any COVID-19 cases, and that no staff member has recently returned from a known contaminated area. These questions are similarly replicated back to the Vendor companies from the Datacenter Managers. On a more practical level where vendors travel from long distances the closure of the hospitality industry means there is no accommodation and therefore no ability for them to provide that service. One participant raised the point that for the future Datacenter Operators should look into having a back-up maintenance provider, should the first choice become incapacitated at a crucial time.
However, these measures only apply to those sites still carrying out maintenance or allowing 3rd party employees on site. For some on the Roundtable all maintenance and visits have been deferred and banned until after the country-wide lockdown is lifted. For one participant the internal staff have been trained to carry our small-scale maintenance in the meantime
With the continuing questions around staffing the datacenter safely for all involved the discussion turned to how we can limit our on-site personnel to as few people as possible during times like this, and also the use of BMS systems. A poll was taken to find out from the Roundtable participants how many are able to remotely access their BMS system, as this could help limit those needed on site. From the participants roughly 40% are able to do this at this time, although it must be taken on an individual organisations business situation if this is a future plan for datacenter operations.
When looking to future 2 predictions were made:
1: This crisis has exponentially speed up the Digital Transformation globally. It has shown everyone how much the global economy, and individuals well-being, is reliant on our Industry, and the huge benefits it provides.

2: One participant predicted that because of the increase in use of traditional forms of the Internet this will slow the progress of Edge Datacenters and 5G, as people will want broadband to strengthen to facilitate working from home over roaming data.

Overall, this Roundtable once again provided an invaluable insight into this unfolding situation, and the procedures and challenges everyone is facing and finding solutions to. At this time, it might be too soon to really predict what, if any, changes we will see in the future.