CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS
“ Hurricanes , floods , and wildfires are on the rise - all of them impacting the ability of data centres to stay online ”
DAVID WATKINS SOLUTIONS DIRECTOR , VIRTUS DATA CENTRES
disaster recovery backup site some distance away ) the total number of data centres worldwide was roughly estimated at around 8.55 million . Over the next two years , the industry began to grow significantly , but by the time we get to 2017 , the number of data centres around the world is estimated to have fallen to just 8.4 million . From 2017 to today ( during which time the colocation industry alone grew by more than 14 % yearon-year ) that number fell again . Today , there are estimated to be just 7.2 million data centres operating around the world .
It ’ s not like data centres are an endangered species , but the condensation of the industry ’ s growing capacity into a shrinking number of facilities puts additional stress on the security teams tasked with keeping them safe .
More Eggs in Fewer Baskets So , we have bigger and bigger amounts of increasingly critical data being stored in fewer data centres . As a number of high profile outages over the past year alone have proven , the consequences of even a single server going offline can be devastating . And , as proven by the fire at OVH Cloud ’ s facility in France earlier this year , or the impact of Storm Uri on the Texas data centre industry ,
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