The internet of things (IoT) presents us with enormous opportunities to positively affect the world around us —everything from increasing air quality to easing traffic to saving water and electricity.

We are all familiar with the schism between hype and reality. For example, your favorite baseball team signs a hyped prospect who scouts are projecting will be “the next Mays,” but unfortunately, he winds up hitting more like Shirley Mays than Willie Mays and is never heard from again.

A few weeks back, I had dinner with Jon Atkins from RBC Capital Markets and some other friends in San Francisco. At dinner, Jon gave me his January 2019 Equity Research, which is the best prospective I have seen to date. All indicators point in the direction of growth.

As mission critical managers continually strive for methods to extend continuous operation, a successful practice is increasingly seeing implementation: the orientation program.

High throughput, low latency, network availability, reliability, and security have always been top priorities in data centers, but the recent wave of technological advances — autonomous cars, augmented reality, 5G, and all other connected objects of the Internet of Things (IoT) — are taking those priorities to a new level and bringing new challenges to IT systems administrators and data centers managers.

It has been almost three years since the ASHRAE 90.4 Energy Standard for Data Centers was finalized and went into effect in 2016, yet even today, many in the data center industry are not fully aware of its existence or its implications.