Remember ten years ago? Facebook was this fairly new thing that all the kids did, and mom and dad were recently exposed to. Twitter was 140 characters of new hotness. And then there was this buzz word that everyone used called “cloud.”

Fire up the Wayback Machine, and let’s travel back to the year 1996 — the time when the Telecommunications Act paved a competitive pathway for traditional phone companies and internet businesses.

The data center industry is experiencing unprecedented growth. There is currently 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, and this pace is accelerating with the emergence of the IoT. By the year 2020, the IoT will comprise more than 30 billion connected devices. 

What is happening in the state of the mission critical industry? In this ongoing feature, we ask industry leaders their thoughts on where the industry is headed and what will happen along the way.

There is a crisis developing in the critical facilities labor market. The available pool of qualified and experienced talent is not keeping up with the demand.

Like most people I imagine, I am subscribed to a dizzying amount of news feeds that are delivered to my personal email; so many I have lost count and, so many I pay little attention to it, unless it has to do with data centers.

Those lazy, hazy days of summer are upon us again and while I have written about this before, many small and midsize firms will still see their data center’s cooling systems pushed to their limits, and even far beyond.