By Jonathan Duncan, VP Secure Power systems, Anglophone Africa at Schneider Electric

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, famously noted last year that, “we’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” I think we can all agree that the pace of digital transformation has not slowed much since then. It’s very important to recognise the expanding role of datacentres in our increasingly digital society. Simply put, datacentres facilitate our digital-first future. Given our ever growing dependence on datacentres, it’s critical that we identify with two of the biggest issues datacentre operators face as they move into the future: Resiliency and Sustainability.

The Defining Issue of our Time

Climate change is undoubtedly one of the defining issues of our time. We are the first generation to recognise it, and we are the generation best positioned to enact long-standing change.

Climate change is essentially an energy driven challenge considering over 80% of global CO2 emissions are due to the production and consumption of energy. The way we use energy today is largely inefficient. We have reached a critical juncture, it has taken us over one hundred years to reach this point and according to the latest IPCC report, released in August of 2021, we have just nine years to reign in our emissions to keep within the 1.5C temperature rise threshold. However, this target is more feasible than we think but will require a huge shift in mindset, new greener technologies and more collaboration across industries.

The Path to Sustainability and Resiliency

At Schneider Electric, we see a path to achieving sustainability and resiliency which doesn’t require business compromise or trade-offs and is further enabled by electricity and digitalisation. We believe electricity is the most effective source of energy and could be the best vector of decarbonisation. 

By taking this a step further and coupling digital technology with electric, the way we use electricity becomes smarter and this digitalisation makes the invisible…visible, this enables the identification and thus elimination of waste in the electrical network, thus driving efficiency gains. Finally, the connecting of dots and enabling visibility across all facets of an operation or process is integral to powering a new smarter electric world – what we at Schneider refer to as “Electricity 4.0”.

Datacentres: Enabling our digital-first future

There’s been a lot of discussion around the remarkable progress we’ve made over the last 24 months towards a digital-first future. This accelerated transition to digitalisation is enabled by datacentres which are the backbone of the digital world.

In our increasingly digital world, we’ve witnessed a growing demand for datacentre services. Datacentre uptime was always a business imperative with clear expectations outlined in service level agreements (SLAs), today, as a result of our increased dependency on datacentres, any downtime or outage experienced across the digital chain, has become high-profile, headline-making news!

Very recent examples include the Fastly outage (content delivery network) in June or the networking glitch which caused an outage for Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram in early October. The later outage impacted not only recreational social media users but also small and medium-sized businesses which rely on the platforms for their marketing and communication activities.

At the same time, there is growing awareness and public discussion around the environmental impact of datacentres in countries around the globe. Some countries have placed moratoriums on new datacentre builds. Singapore, where datacentres account for 7% of the nation’s electricity usage, paused new datacentre builds in 2019 as they work to identify solutions to enable more sustainable datacentre operations in the tropical climate. 

In regions struggling with water shortage, such as the U.S. West-coast, local communities have raised concerns over new datacentre deployments and their usage of finite water supplies.

Achieving resiliency and sustainability in datacentre operations are both now business imperatives that are pitched to challenge all operators. It is a common misperception that both cannot be achieved in datacentre operations. In fact, datacentres of the future will readily demonstrate that responsibly maintaining uptime ambition and efficient energy usage in operations is possible by leveraging new technologies and implementing bold strategies with an open change mindset.