Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, data centers are changing and adapting to the ‘new normal’
By Amanda Brooks
Data centers are evolving and it’s important to keep up with the changes!
- Less Travel: Equinix, the world’s largest colocation provider, struggled during the pandemic’s travel restrictions and lockdowns. Jon Lin, president of the Americas for Equinix said that the most obvious adjustment was that customers could no longer travel to Equinix facilities. Many companies do not want to plan business trips again because of the many waves of infection and different COVID strains. “It’s hard to navigate borders,” he said. “So [customers are] trusting us to do more and more.” As a result, Equinix has had to take over many additional roles that customers used to perform themselves like racking and stacking equopment and basic equipment maintenance.
- Health and Safety Precautions: Before the pandemic, many employees would come in to work despite having a cold. “Now, if you have a sore throat, you’re going to stay home and reduce the exposure to people around you,” Lin said.
- Working from Home: Many employees enjoy working from home- it offers more flexibility. Most Equinix offices around the world have reopened, Lin said, so that employees can come in if they want to get away from hectic home situations. But, except for data center operations staff who need to be hands-on in the facilities, it won’t be required. During the pandemic, 95% of non-data-center-operations staff worked from home. The majority of office workers are continuing to work from home or remotely, which is becoming ‘the new normal.’ A Gallup poll released earlier this month showed that 67% of white-collar workers were working from home at least some of the time in September. And 91% of workers who are working remotely say they hope to retain that option when the pandemic ends. In August, a Gartner poll showed that 66% of organizations are delaying reopening their offices due to new COVID-19 variants. According to the Gallup poll, 31% of workers say they will look for other jobs if forced to work exclusively in an office. According to Gartner analyst Graham Waller, 86% of IT employees would prefer a hybrid or remote model, and 66% say their ability to work flexibly will impact their decision on whether to stay at an organization. With the Delta and other variants causing second and third waves of the pandemic, any expectation of going back to the old way of doing things has been shot, he added.
- Freedom to Leave and Hire: The labor shortage is allowing IT professionals to change jobs in an easy way. Working remotely has eliminated geographical barriers. Moving operations from physical locations to the cloud has also cut costs.
- Decline of Physical Data Centers: “A lot of people were looking at cloud as a disaster recovery backup,” said JJ Safer, practice development manager for security at Insight, a technology consulting company in Tempe, Arizona. Now, you can do everything remotely. Companies that rent space in alrge office buildings for their data centers are talking about whether they want to stay there, he added. According to a report by Synergy Research Group released last spring, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure surpassed spending on data center hardware and software for the first time. Even as cloud infrastructure spending continues to grow at an exponential rate, spending on enterprise data centers fell by 6% last year, to under $90 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure grew by 35%, to nearly $130 billion. Then there’s edge computing, said Rebecca Herold, IEEE thought leader, author, security and privacy consultant, and member of the NIST IoT cybersecurity program development team.
- Increase of Cyberthreats: With systems and processes moving to the cloud and employees working remotely, the attack surface has expanded dramatically. “There are more types of malware and cybercrime threats to protect against,” said Herold. According to a survey conducted by Citrix last month, 74% of security decision-makers say procedures and controls have become more complex as their organizations transition to remote and hybrid work, and 73% are fighting to keep up with the increased volume of security threats that the new work models create. Although the pandemic has created problems and changed the landscape, it has also created new opportunities. According to the survey, 79% of decision-makers polled say the pandemic has created an opportunity to completely rethink their long-term information security strategy.
Read the full article at datacenterknowledge.com
