Global Data Center Survey shows that resilience is increasing
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- Published: Thursday, 22 September 2022 07:52
Uptime Institute has released its 12th Annual Global Data Center Survey. The findings show an industry that is becoming increasingly resilient, but still working to address complex challenges.
“The global digital infrastructure sector continues to enjoy strong growth and expansion, despite the many obstacles operators are facing today,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research, Uptime Institute Intelligence. “We’ve seen the industry invest in increased resiliency and reliability, but there’s still work to be done when it comes to improving efficiency, environmental sustainability, outage prevention, staffing pipelines and more.”
Key findings from the Annual Global Data Center Survey include:
More operators are investing to bolster data center resilience – data center owners and operators are making significant investments in the resiliency of their physical infrastructure, with about 40 percent of respondents reporting increased redundancy levels at their primary data centers in the past three to five years. Power and cooling systems have received similar attention, with a third of operators upgrading either or both.
Outages are becoming more expensive and are still far too frequent – the share of all outages costing operators over $1 million has reached 25 percent, a significant increase from 15 percent in 2021. In 2022, 60 percent of operators reported experiencing an outage (regardless of severity) in the past three years - down from 69 percent in 2021 and 78 percent in 2020. Although the data indicates a trend toward improved outage rates, the frequency of outages is still much too high and with more than two-thirds now costing operators upwards of $100,000, the consequences are getting worse.
Operators’ confidence in public cloud is on the rise, despite ongoing outage risks – as the perception of improved visibility into cloud operational resilience grows, organizations are more likely to trust the cloud for mission-critical workloads. In 2022, just 63 percent of operators are not placing mission-critical workloads into a public cloud, a substantial drop from almost 75 percent in 2019. That trust might be misplaced, given that more than one-third of respondents report that public cloud availability zone outages (which are relativity common) would cause significant performance issues.
About the survey
Uptime Institute conducts its annual Global Data Center Survey online and by email. This year’s study took place in H1 2022, and includes responses from approximately 800 data center owners and operators responsible for managing infrastructure at the world’s largest IT organizations. It also includes insights from 700 data center suppliers, designers, and advisors worldwide.
