Uptime Institute has reported on data center outages for several years, surveying operators on their experiences with outages. This year’s survey was conducted March-April 2020 and includes responses from nearly 850 managers at organizations that own and operate data centers in more than 50 countries.
The largest single cause is power problems
In surveys from 2018 and 2019, and now supported by our 2020 survey, outages occur with disturbing frequency, bigger outages are becoming more damaging and expensive. According to the announcement, a second survey was conducted among a group of over 500 suppliers, designers, and advisors. Those survey results will be released in September 2020.
Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, Uptime Institute, said,
“Our 2020 survey results reflect a strong, growing sector facing increased change and complexity. The growing complexity, along with the greater consequences of failure, creates the need for more vigilance and more sophisticated approaches to resiliency, performance and operations”.
Uptime Institute survey findings for three years show that outages continue to occur with disturbing frequency, and the outages are becoming bigger, more damaging, and more expensive. And over the previous 3-year period, more than three-quarters said they had experienced such an outage.
Lack of transparency of public cloud
According to respondents, the lack of visibility, lack of transparency and accountability of public cloud services is clearly a major issue for these enterprises considering public cloud for business-critical applications. A fifth of managers said they would be more likely to run their critical workloads in a public cloud if there were a higher level of visibility into the operational resiliency of the service.
Additional Findings:
- The enterprise data center is neither dead nor dying, while the Edge is still on the edge. The migration of critical loads to a public cloud is happening slowly, with more than half of all IT workloads expected to remain in traditional on-premises data centers through at least 2022. Edge computing requirements are expected to increase slightly in 2020, but fewer than a fifth of all respondents expect a significant increase.
- Artificial intelligence will not take over – yet. Artificial intelligence and automation will not reduce data center operations staffing requirements in the next five years. After that, however, most think it will.
- The data center staffing crisis is getting worse. The number of managers stating they are having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open infrastructure positions is rising steadily. Women continue to be under-represented. More effort is needed to address the workforce gender imbalance and take advantage of the larger and more diverse skilled talent pool.