Since the beginning of 2020, people have been forced to reckon with the grim reality that we are all vulnerable, and crises can come in many unpredictable forms. Almost overnight, a global pandemic sent the world’s workforce home and stretched networks to their limits. We experienced a severe winter storm in Texas, of all places, that disabled the state’s power grid; wildfires that ravaged the western U.S., Australia, and South America; and other severe weather events around the globe. The human and financial toll of these disasters has been nothing short of devastating, and the effects will be felt for years, if not decades.
For data center owners, accepting any notion that the current infrastructure and its robust backup power systems are immune to these sorts of crises would be a huge mistake. Climate change is causing more and more extreme weather events each year, and the U.S. is shattering annual records for billion-dollar disasters. This summer will be the hottest on record for more than 30 cities across America. According to an Uptime Institute report, three in five respondents think there will be more IT service outages as a direct result of the impact of climate change, and nearly 90% think climate change will drive up the cost of data center infrastructure and operations over the next 10 years.