The Uptime Institute has stated that with more investment in management , process and training , outage frequency of data centres would almost certainly fall significantly . Sarah Parks , Marketing and Communications Director , CNet Training , considers some of the ways to reduce highly preventable downtime as human error accounts for a large number of outages .

biggest risk in a data centre ? Unfortunately , the answer is that usually , your people are the single point of failures in a data centre . Human error still accounts for a large proportion of outages and quite simply , not enough is being done to address the issue . Findings from a recent survey from Uptime Institute show that outages are becoming more frequent and more expensive . Now really is the time for the industry to wake up and start paying attention by looking at ways to reduce this highly preventable downtime .

When you have humans involved , it is inevitable that mistakes are going to happen . However , just accepting the risk that mistakes might happen is not really recommended . Processes and putting rigorous professional development plans in place needs to be the norm . Organisations need to learn from their previous outage experiences and help to mitigate against the inevitable human error probability by continually assessing , reviewing and enhancing the skills set of their teams .

We are all aware that outages are hugely costly for organisations ; but it ’ s not just the financial impact , it ’ s also the detrimental effect it can have on brand reputation , customer confidence and perceived compliance . Investing in staff education / training and personal development can pay significant dividends , educated / officially certified individuals could potentially save their employer millions by doing things right and therefore mitigating the possibility of an outage , or recognising and resolving an issue early and preventing an outage .

Looking at the 2020 Data Center Industry Survey Results report by Uptime Institute , we see what IT and data centre managers around the world are thinking , doing and planning in the areas of efficiency ,

Sarah Parks , Marketing and Communications Director , CNet Training

resiliency , workload placement , staffing and new technology adoption . A total of 78 % of organisations have stated that they have had an IT-related outage in the last three years , with 75 % saying that their most recent outage could have been prevented with better management , meaning that a large proportion of outages were a result of human error . This figure has increased by 15 % since 2019 , when the survey asked the same question .

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