August 11, 2021
We’re not sure who coined the phrase, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” but they knew what they were talking about. 2020 & 2021 have seen business, entertainment, recreation and educational “analog” systems seriously shaken due to the coronavirus pandemic, with “digital” replacement and supplemental systems tirelessly filling the gaps. Tried and true habits and patterns of living and earning incomes have flown out the window – replaced by rapid and not-so-rapid adoptions of digital methods of conducting business (Zoom and telecommuting, anyone?), dining at home (Uber Eats, Grubhub), staying at home (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu), and buying EVERYTHING online (again, Amazon).
The work world has perhaps experienced the greatest degree of change. After all, when just about everyone who can work from home does so, it’s like the greatest Sick Day ever experienced in the free world, multiplied times five days a week and then times 12 months or more. The rise of online employee monitoring software, time management systems, conferencing technologies, rapid cloud-based adoption of SaaS, and good old computer usage has literally skyrocketed – with many IT and Labor experts hailing the beginning of an entirely new way of working, at least for office employees.
What is often forgotten in all of this transformation is the IT infrastructure that is allowing most of this distance employment, distance learning, distance medicine and distance communication to happen in the first place – solid, foundational IT and network technology that all comes down to data centers. Remember, the lofty Cloud where everyone is storing their data and accessing their digital tools is actually hundreds of thousands of data centers across the country and around the planet. Data centers, it turns out, are keeping the free world alive and work-able.
Data Center Sustainability and Edge Computing
We came across this trenchant article from a data center colocation company named vXchnge. The article anticipates and predicts five big trends that are happening with data centers even as you read this post. Trends like edge computing – data centers being situated closer to where the data is actually being consumed all across America – which is vitally important in an economy where more and more individuals are working from home at least part of the time.
As the article explains it, “As more people adopt smart technologies in their homes and businesses, the demand for edge computing will grow and so will edge data centers. In fact, the IoT market is expected to grow by over $50 billion by 2022. With that kind of growth, and that kind of demand for reliability, speed, and connectivity, the edge market will need to grow.”
And trends like sustainable data centers, which makes complete sense in a world where a large majority or countries are beginning to experience the effects of global weather change, usually deleterious. As more and more data centers begin to dot the land as IT demands escalate, the need for those data centers to conserve energy and to leverage natural resources wisely will only continue to grow.
Quoting this coverage, “Look for data centers to find ways to not only reduce their impact on the environment, but also ways to help other sectors as well, as with waste heat recycling.”
As data center consultants with expertise in the IT industry since 1996, we’re finding these thoughts and ideas pretty compelling. We hope you will as well.
See our full range of data center services offered by Altus Technologies while you’re here – including data center migrations, data center security, power analysis, and data center disaster avoidance.
