EXPERT OPINION
Alpesh Saraiya , Senior Data Centre Director , Honeywell
Blueprinting data centre designs to achieve commonality across facilities has thus become a key strategy for ‘ doing more with less ’. While many see it as a critical step towards developing and implementing global design standards , operators must still comply with local and national building codes , financial accounting laws and security regulations .
Many data centre managers are also streamlining their operations with welldefined , purpose-built workflows and operational management tools to further reduce OpEx while still protecting uptime . To this end , some are installing cross-domain , site-level monitoring and management platforms to automate as many tasks as possible , thereby easing workloads and reducing the chances of human error , which caused major outages over the last three years at
40 % of organisations surveyed by the Uptime Institute .
Tougher internal and external sustainability mandates
Data centres face mounting pressure from governments , clients and stockholders to become more sustainable and energy efficient . A sustainability strategy is no longer simply a ‘ nice to have ’; in the future , it may determine whether an operator succeeds or fails . With financial firms at either end of the transaction – as both clients and providers of capital – operators will face an additional hurdle of expectations when seeking to fund future projects , particularly as pressure increases on private equity and real estate investors to make greener investments . Further , even clients shopping for data centre colocation service providers are now examining ESG profiles to account for upstream Scope 2 and 3 carbon footprint .
As data centre operators struggle to scale up across different geographies , they face a range of ever-stricter local and national regulatory landscapes . Many of these include increasingly rigorous sustainability and ESG financial reporting standards that will phase in over this decade .
Governments including Ireland , the Netherlands and Singapore are requiring owners and operators to submit a detailed sustainability plan before granting them approval to build a new facility or expand an existing one . Singapore , in fact , imposed a moratorium on new data centre projects in 2019 and kept it in place until January 2022 . Applicants for new projects must now explain how they will meet www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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