Digital services are relied upon now more than ever for remote working tools, streaming, online entertainment, healthcare and more.
In some European countries, internet use has been up as much as 50% as more economic activity has shifted online.
All this internet usage creates enormous amounts of data for the organisations we work with and that’s where data centres come in. Data centres play an increasingly vital role in the world’s economy.
What is a Data Centre?
A data centre is a facility that centralises an organisation’s shared IT operations and equipment for the purposes of storing processing, and disseminating data and applications. Because they house an organisation’s most critical and proprietary assets, data centres are vital to the continuity of daily operations.
There are four main types of data centres:
- Enterprise data centres: a private facility operated for the sole use of supporting a single organisation. They can be located on-premises as part of a larger campus or business site, but in many cases they are located off-premises at a site chosen for connectivity, power, and security purposes.
- Managed services data centres: a type of data centre model that is deployed, managed and monitored at/from a third-party data centre service provider. It provides features and functionality similar to that of a standard data centre, but through a managed service platform (MSP)
- Colocation data centres: or “carrier hotel”, is a type of data centre where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers
- Cloud data centres: is a remote version of a data centre – located somewhere away from your company’s physical premises – that lets you access your data through the internet
Many of the data centres are owned by US groups, Equinix and Digital Reality. Both dominate the global business of data centres, which host computing and storage systems to enable the delivery of web services. Their biggest customers are groups such as Amazon, Netflix and Facebook. Some of these large groups also set-up their own datacentres like Google.
The challenge for many multi-tenant data centre providers is to cater to temporary spikes while enabling customers to return to pre-COVID-19 use cases after the event.
For colocation providers, there is a growing demand for additional data centre and networking bandwidth.
The Nordics
In Europe the Nordic countries are in particular popular for data centre developments, partly because of environmental reasons as data centres want to be seen as being green and energy efficient because they use such a high amount of energy. The Nordic countries are big in producing a surplus in renewable energies and are well advanced in making use of the energy/heat that data centres produce themselves. The five key advantages the Nordics have for data centre development are: abundant renewable energy, reliable power supply, low energy prices, political stability and faster time-to-market primarily due to ease of doing business.
In Denmark some 64% of Danish households receive waste heat, including heat supplied by data centres – one of the highest reuse proportions in Europe.
The Nordic data centre construction market is estimated to attract annual investments of EUR 2-4.3 billion by 2025. This corresponds to an installed annual capacity of 280-580 MW per year. The Nordic region is well connected to the UK, continental Europe, and the US, and major fibre optic installations linking the Nordics to North America and Asia are in the planning stages.
Cloud and hyperscale companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services and Apple have made major investments in Nordic data centres recently. Reports show that the Nordics meet all key criteria for site selection, ranging from reliable, renewable energy to world class fibre optic infrastructure.
In addition to electricity production that is two thirds renewable across the region, from sources such as biomass, hydropower, geothermal and wind power, this underscores the competitive value of advancing cross-border collaboration in the Nordics.
The Nordic region is not just well connected and integrated to continental Europe, the UK and the U.S, but increasingly to Asia. The Nordics are speeding ahead with intercontinental installations along the Polar fibre route. This means we may be seeing the quickest routes to moving traffic via the Nordic countries in the near future.
All in all we can see that data centres worldwide have not been badly affected by the Covid-19 crisis. There has been a negative impact for airlines and the hotel industry, but for data centres it has highlighted the importance of having a digital infrastructure.
TCP Solutions is well experienced in working with data centres and providing specific local payroll solutions for a variety of data centre staff from site engineers, electrical fitters, health and safety officers to admin and back office staff and even Covid-19 specialists (virologist). Our team would be happy to inform you more about what we can do for you regarding employing temporarily staff for international data centres. Call us on +44 (0)208 5800 800 or contact us via info@tcpsolutions.com
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