Are we seeing a shift in business culture?
Andy Davis
Creator of Data Centre Club: Are you in? | Data Centre Recruitment | Host of Inside Data Centre Podcast | Writer Weekly Data Centre News
Has it really only been 3 weeks??
Just over three weeks ago in the UK we were pretty much carrying on as normal and then it was announced that we would enter the lock-down stage to fight the virus that has changed all our lives. Since that point the working life for millions in the UK has changed dramatically, and I believe it will also lead to a shift in business culture for many people. I am writing this in a makeshift office in my house while my 3 children cause chaos in the next room. I have virtually seen my clients houses, met their family, and also quite a few dogs! I never thought I would say that a month ago..
One of the challenges has been enabling a larger remote work force than ever before. As work and schools shifted to bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchen tables we are all relying on internet services more than ever before. The task is that most companies networks have not been set up to give the majority of their employees private, secure network access to corporate networks from their homes. The US saw a 150% increase in the use of VPN’s in week commencing 16th March.
Cisco has had to ration VPN’s due to the strain of 100000+ users on its network. Bailey Szeto (Vice President of Cisco Customer & Seller) recently: “We had to think about getting ready for 140,000 employees and partners. That meant we had to prepare 130,000 devices and 55,000 BYOD devices, across 498 offices in 94 countries.”
Infrastructure teams have been working hard to make sure that those services stay online by expanding bandwidth on their networks and computing muscle in their data centres. Data centre engineers and staff, are now deemed critical workers in countries across the globe.
Bevan Slattery of NEXTDC compared data centres to toilet paper in a recent LinkedIn post: ‘If you think people hoarding toilet paper was bad, can you imagine what is going to happen to data centre capacity?!’
Cloud providers have already seen a 50%-100% spike in space requirements and that is forecast to rise to 200% in the near term future.
Equinix, the world’s largest data centre operator by revenue has cut off nearly all customer and vendor access to its facilities in France, Germany, Italy and Span last week. They only allowed people in who were ‘critical & essential work’. Out of the big providers Equinix measures in Europe have been the most drastic.
According to TechUK competitor providers have been sharing information to ensure they can maintain operational within their facilities. “At operator level, the key priority is to balance staff safety with availability,” said Emma Fryer, Associate Director, techUK.
It is also all change in construction.. A number of construction projects across the globe have now been stopped or slowed down to ensure the health & safety of all workers on the projects. Facebook moved quickly to stop construction on its major sites in Clonee (Ireland) and Huntsville, Alabama (US).
Data Centre projects before the pandemic were already under pressure to be completed on time and at a rapid pace. With construction projects being pulled into question – for the data centre industry the demand for these projects has only increased as a result of the pandemic. These projects that are on hold will still have deadlines to hit and it is expected to see construction expedited on projects as well as new projects fast-tracked through planning and into construction.
I have absolutely no idea what challenges the next 3 days will bring, let alone the next 3 weeks, but what I can say is that the data centre sector is more critical than ever before. There will be a dramatic shift in all our lives and technology will be at the forefront of that shift in behavior, and we all know what more data means... MORE DATA CENTRES!
Royal Mail Group Ltd - Fleet Programme Mngt.
4 年Good article, thanks for sharing.
Construction Manager Life Sciences & Mission Critical
4 年Two things are essential in our industry. Teamwork and Pride. The ability for all disciplines to work together to provide the client with a product which they are happy to receive can only be achieved with a round table outlook.All too often when things go wrong it is a scramble to see who to blame instead of putting heads together and coming up with a solution for the greater good. Having the essential core of your team together is vital, it's not easy getting a BIM decision from 300 or 3000km away, when you needed it yesterday. Pride is also a key factor in deliverance of a product to a client, pride in your own task and team, instilling it in your team from the ground up.9 times out of 10 if someone has pride in their profession it ultimately leads to a job well done as people wont be shy about telling someone when they are doing a half arsed job, they will not allow a crap job be presented to a client.. Yes, our industry has alot of faults and we have very tough times ahead but if we put the effort into our teams on the ground pride in the job will follow and the client will get the product they deserve!
Director at Black & White Engineering
4 年The Construction industry was already in a poor condition before this Pandemic, struggling to come to terms with new technologies (3D drawing software has been available for nearly 50 years and we still haven't mastered it!) and not been able to improve on efficiency over the past 40 years (CII Study). First cost generally rules and most clients don't have the patience to wait for building designs to be thought through, optimised and co-ordinated, and projects suffer throughout their life cycle due to this. We will now have to change the way we work, and considering the amount of good people that are likely to be lost to the industry, means this change will be even harder to accommodate. Clients will be wanting costs reduced without quality being compromised. Data centres will be critical to the new way of working, and they are large users of energy,(some predictions saying up to 20% of the worlds energy by 2025 - before the current situation) with relatively complex designs. We see many simpler projects handed over in poor state of commissioning, with the blame being scatter gunned across all involved, leaving many clients frustrated but not understanding how they can avoid this situation! This is an industry wide issue that needs to be addressed by the whole industry as no one party can resolve it on their own, so the education process has to start sooner rather than later. The industry is good at creating new roles within itself to address these failings but these only create more confusion and communication issues and don't address the crux of the problem, which is a shortage of skills in key areas, particularly around the MEP and Commissioning - which are the most common areas of failure. I have many examples of projects today being handed over in much worse condition than they were when I came into the industry a long long time ago! We are in for tough times in many ways!