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The findings highlight the growing, industry-wide need to achieve meaningful efficiency gains, evolve sustainability reporting practices, prevent costly outages and more

NEW YORK, NY – September 20, 2022  – Uptime Institute, today announced the release of its 12^th Annual Global Data Center Survey. The findings show an industry that is growing, dynamic and increasingly resilient, but still working to address increasing pressure for sustainability progress and reporting, continuing staffing shortages, supply chain delays, costly outages and other complex challenges.

“The global digital infrastructure sector continues to enjoy strong growth and expansion, despite the many obstacles operators are facing today,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research, Uptime Institute Intelligence. “We’ve seen the industry invest in increased resiliency and reliability, but there’s still work to be done when it comes to improving efficiency, environmental sustainability, outage prevention, staffing pipelines and more.”

Uptime’s annual Global Data Center Survey is the largest and most comprehensive in the digital infrastructure industry. It provides detailed insights into the digital critical infrastructure landscape and a sense of its future trajectory. Key findings from the 2022 report include:

• Many data center operators are unprepared for mounting sustainability requirements and regulations – Most respondents say they report on overall data center power use and PUE, but many still are not tracking critical environmental metrics. Although 63% of operators believe authorities in their region will require them to publicly report environmental data in the next five years, just 37% collect and report carbon emissions data (a slight increase over 33% in 2021) and only 39% currently report their water use (a 12% drop compared to 2021). New laws, standards, and requirements will force operators to address these gaps and establish more stringent sustainability tracking and reporting practices in the coming years.
• PUE progress is in stasis for now and future efficiency gains must focus on IT power – The average annual power usage effectiveness (PUE) reported in 2022 was 1.55. This represents a slight improvement over the 2021 average of 1.57, which is consistent with the trend of marginal PUE gains Uptime has observed annually since 2014. Going forward, achieving substantial data center efficiency improvements will require a new focus on IT efficiency, along with metrics to track and report progress.
• More operators are investing to bolster data center resiliency – Data center owners and operators are making significant investments in the resiliency of their physical infrastructure, with about 40% of respondents reporting increased redundancy levels at their primary data centers in the past three to five years. Power and cooling systems have received similar attention, with a third of operators upgrading either or both.
• Outages are becoming more expensive and are still far too frequent – The share of all outages costing operators over $1 million has reached 25%, a significant increase from 15% in 2021. In 2022, 60% of operators reported experiencing an outage (regardless of severity) in the past three years — down from 69% in 2021 and 78% in 2020. Although the data indicates a trend toward improved outage rates, the frequency of outages is still much too high and with more than two-thirds now costing operators upwards of $100,000, the consequences are getting worse.
• Operators’ confidence in public cloud is on the rise, despite ongoing outage risks – As the perception of improved visibility into cloud operational resiliency grows, organizations are more likely to trust the cloud for mission-critical workloads. In 2022, just 63% of operators are not placing mission-critical workloads into a public cloud, a substantial drop from almost 75% in 2019. That trust might be misplaced, given that more than one-third of respondents report that public cloud availability zone outages (which are relativity common) would cause significant performance issues.
• Data center equipment vendors optimistic despite demand pressures and lingering supply chain problems – Three-quarters of vendors project year-over-year revenue growth in 2022 despite reporting dampened revenues due to persistent COVID-induced supply chain issues. Nearly half of respondents involved with data center construction have suffered significant delays (or other events) in their supply chains, while one-third have experienced moderate issues.
• Problems attracting and retaining qualified staff are worsening – Over half (53%) of data center operators report difficulty finding qualified employees in 2022 — up from 47% in 2021 and 38% in 2018. And 42% of respondents report issues with staff being hired away (in most cases to data center competitors) – a massive increase over just 17% in 2018, which demonstrates the growing challenge of employee retention throughout the sector.

Learn More: Uptime’s 2022 Global Data Center Survey also includes findings on industry attitudes toward nuclear energy, server refresh rates, rack density trends and much more. Download the complete report here, and register for the webinar covering its key trends and takeaways on September 28^th at 11:00 a.m. ET.

About the Survey: Uptime conducts its annual Global Data Center Survey online and by email. This year’s study took place in H1 2022, and includes responses from approximately 800 data center owners and operators responsible for managing infrastructure at the world’s largest IT organizations. It also includes insights from 700 data center suppliers, designers, and advisors worldwide.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. For over 25 years, the company has established industry-leading benchmarks for data center performance, resilience, sustainability, and efficiency, which provide customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform across a wide array of operating conditions at a level consistent with their business needs. Uptime’s Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the design, construction, and operation of data centers – the backbone of the digital economy. With its Tier Standard and Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, SCIRA-FSI financial sector risk assessment, broad range of additional risk and performance assessments, Intelligence research services, and accredited training courses completed by over 10,000 data center professionals, Uptime has helped thousands of companies in over 100 countries to optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in Seattle, London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Singapore, and Taipei. For more information, please visit www.uptimeinstitute.com.

Giving customers access to world class corporate learning & development at every point in a digital infrastructure career

NEW YORK, NY – February 3, 2023  – Uptime Institute, the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority, a Dominus Capital, L.P. portfolio company, announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Academia Group Limited and all of its global subsidiaries including CNet Training, Ltd.

CNet Training, located in Bury Saint Edmunds, Suffolk, England, is an International award-winning technical education company. CNet Training has been designing and delivering professional network and data center infrastructure training programs since 1996 and has trained over 83,000 data center professionals across 45 countries.

“The data center industry is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. The continued, extraordinary industry expansion requires a growing and diverse workforce, however concerns over the industry’s ability to attract, educate, and retain skilled technical staff persist. This acquisition will help our respective customers thrive in a rapidly changing ecosystem, by giving them access to a range of world class corporate learning and development technical education programs that are backed up by practical experience and specialized domain expertise,” said Martin V. McCarthy, CEO, Uptime Institute.

CNet Training dramatically extends the range and depth of Uptime Education offerings and positions Uptime as the Learning & Development partner of choice around the world. The combined offerings will include solutions valuable for every point in a career for a digital infrastructure professional. This includes entry level staff, even adolescents in apprenticeships, to post graduate degrees in Data Center Leadership for savvy, long serving professionals.

“We are excited to join the accelerating Uptime team. CNet Training was already growing quickly, but now will have many more opportunities through further geographic expansion, and new service offerings, as a part of Uptime. As we look forward to this next phase, I want to personally thank all our clients, staff, and investors who have supported us over these past 26 + years of delivering unique value and in bringing ongoing innovation to the Digital Infrastructure Education market,” said Andrew Stevens, CEO of CNet Training.

Uptime Institute’s Intelligence team recently completed a market research study indicating the number of staff needed to design, build, and operate data centers will continue to grow globally from about 2.0 million in 2019 to nearly 2.3 million by 2025. A wide range of specialist jobs (230 detailed in Uptime Institute Data Center Career Pathfinder, developed in association with Google, Meta & Microsoft) are required by the sector to support its continued expansion. The combination of Uptime Institute and CNet Training will directly address the evolving training needs of all current and future data center employees as they progress through their careers.

Bob Haswell, Founding Partner at Dominus Capital, added, “This first acquisition for Uptime under Dominus ownership will further establish Uptime Education as the unparalleled leader in Digital Infrastructure Education around the world. Uptime is the undisputed market leader worldwide, with results-oriented solutions for both providers and consumers of services delivered through mission critical data center, the true digital foundries, and factories of the Internet economy. The ongoing availability, resiliency, sustainability, security, and business value of these key infrastructure building blocks still overwhelmingly depend on the quality and capabilities of the workforces that operate them, and the skill, training and education of each individual team member.”

Uptime Institute continues to identify and assess potential add-on acquisitions to broaden its offering and continue to execute on its mission to help data center owners, operators, and tenants ensure resilient, available, sustainable, and secure digital infrastructure.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. For over 25 years, the company has established industry-leading benchmarks for data center performance, resilience, sustainability, and efficiency, which provide customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform across a wide array of operating conditions at a level consistent with their business needs. Uptime’s Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the design, construction, and operation of data centers – the backbone of the digital economy. With its Tier Standard and Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, SCIRA-FSI financial sector risk assessment, broad range of additional risk and performance assessments, Intelligence research services, and accredited training courses completed by over 10,000 data center professionals, Uptime has helped thousands of companies in over 100 countries to optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, KSA Singapore, and Taipei. For more information, please visit www.uptimeinstitute.com.

About CNet Training

CNet Training (CNet) has been delivering technical education programs since 1996. Today CNet is the global leader in technical education for the digital infrastructure industry, comprising the data center and network infrastructure sectors and is the only industry dedicated education provider to award both internationally recognized qualifications and professional certifications. A significant part of CNet Training ’s history is the development of the highly acclaimed Global Digital Infrastructure Education Framework, which offers industry professionals an opportunity to plan technical education, qualifications, and certifications to meet on-going individual and business needs.

Since CNet’s inception it has delivered training across 218 delivery locations in 45 countries and in 19 time zones. Over 83,000 individuals of 153 different nationalities have accessed CNet Training’s technical education. For more information, please visit www.cnet-training.com.

About Dominus Capital, L.P.

Based in New York, Dominus Capital is a leading middle-market private equity investment firm focused on management-led buyouts and growth capital investments in family-owned and founder-operated companies in the business services and light manufacturing sectors. Drawing on the experience, knowledge and network of its founders and a team of in-house operating executives, Dominus works hand-in-hand with exceptional management teams to unlock the untapped potential of its portfolio companies. Recently named one of the top 50 middle market private equity firms, Dominus takes a long-term approach to investing and has a consistent and highly successful track record of achieving significant growth at its portfolio companies. The Dominus team has executed more than 90 transactions over the past 20+ years. For more information, please visit www.dominuscap.com.

New research details latest digital infrastructure failure rates, increasing outage costs and impacts, top downtime causes, and more

NEW YORK, NY – June 8, 2022  – The digital infrastructure sector is struggling to achieve a measurable reduction in outage rates and severity, and the financial consequences and overall disruption from outages are steadily increasing, according to Uptime Institute, which today released the findings of its 2022 annual Outage Analysis report.

“Digital infrastructure operators are still struggling to meet the high standards that customers expect and service level agreements demand – despite improving technologies and the industry’s strong investment in resiliency and downtime prevention,” said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director, Uptime Institute Intelligence.

“The lack of improvement in overall outage rates is partly the result of the immensity of recent investment in digital infrastructure, and all the associated complexity that operators face as they transition to hybrid, distributed architectures,” said Lawrence. “In time, both the technology and operational practices will improve, but at present, outages remain a top concern for customers, investors, and regulators. Operators will be best able to meet the challenge with rigorous staff training and operational procedures to mitigate the human error behind many of these failures.”

Uptime’s annual outage analysis is unique in the industry, and draws on multiple surveys, information supplied by Uptime Institute members and partners, and its database of publicly reported outages.

Key Findings Include:

• High outage rates haven’t changed significantly. One in five organizations report experiencing a “serious” or “severe” outage (involving significant financial losses, reputational damage, compliance breaches and in some severe cases, loss of life) in the past three years, marking a slight upward trend in the prevalence of major outages. According to Uptime’s 2022 Data Center Resiliency Survey, 80% of data center managers and operators have experienced some type of outage in the past three years – a marginal increase over the norm, which has fluctuated between 70% and 80%.
• The proportion of outages costing over $100,000 has soared in recent years. Over 60% of failures result in at least $100,000 in total losses, up substantially from 39% in 2019. The share of outages that cost upwards of $1 million increased from 11% to 15% over that same period.
• Power-related problems continue to dog data center operators. Power-related outages account for 43% of outages that are classified as significant (causing downtime and financial loss). The single biggest cause of power incidents is uninterruptible power supply (UPS) failures.
• Networking issues are causing a large portion of IT outages. According to Uptime’s 2022 Data Center Resiliency Survey, networking-related problems have been the single biggest cause of all IT service downtime incidents – regardless of severity – over the past three years. Outages attributed to software, network and systems issues are on the rise due to complexities from the increasing use of cloud technologies, software-defined architectures and hybrid, distributed architectures.
• The overwhelming majority of human error-related outages involve ignored or inadequate procedures. Nearly 40% of organizations have suffered a major outage caused by human error over the past three years. Of these incidents, 85% stem from staff failing to follow procedures or from flaws in the processes and procedures themselves.
• External IT providers cause most major public outages. The more workloads that are outsourced to external providers, the more these operators account for high-profile, public outages. Third-party, commercial IT operators (including cloud, hosting, colocation, telecommunication providers, etc.) account for 63% of all publicly reported outages that Uptime has tracked since 2016. In 2021, commercial operators caused 70% of all outages.
• Prolonged downtime is becoming more common in publicly reported outages. The gap between the beginning of a major public outage and full recovery has stretched significantly over the last five years. Nearly 30% of these outages in 2021 lasted more than 24 hours, a disturbing increase from just 8% in 2017.
• Public outage trends suggest there will be at least 20 serious, high-profile IT outages worldwide each year. Of the 108 publicly reported outages in 2021, 27 were serious or severe. This ratio has been fairly consistent since the Uptime Intelligence team began cataloging major outages in 2016, indicating that roughly one-fourth of publicly recorded outages each year are likely to be serious or severe.

Learn More: For further insight into Uptime’s latest research on digital infrastructure failures, register to attend the upcoming 2022 Outage Report webinar on Thursday, June 16th at 9:00 a.m. PDT here.

The complete report is available exclusively for the Uptime Institute Membership Network, the world’s largest group of data center owners and operators. Learn more about Uptime Institute Membership and request a free guest trial here.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. Its Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the proper design, construction, and operation of data centers – the backbone of the digital economy. For over 25 years, the company has served as the standard for data center reliability, sustainability, and efficiency, providing customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform at a level that is consistent with their business needs across a wide array of operating conditions. With its data center Tier Standard & Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, broad range of related risk and performance assessments, and accredited educational curriculum completed by over 10,000 data center professionals, Uptime Institute has helped thousands of companies, in over 100 countries to optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in Seattle, London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Singapore, and Taipei and staff in over 25 other countries. For more information, please visit www.uptimeinstitute.com.