14 November 2020

David Watkins, solutions director for Virtus Data Centres

You don’t have to work in technology to know that the internet is powering the way we live and work. Wired and wireless digital connectivity is a fundamental component of healthcare systems, remote working and learning, e-commerce, and public service delivery – particularly crucial during the COVID pandemic. You also don’t have work in the industry to know that the infrastructure that makes all of this work has often been considered a significant blight on the environment.

Today, there are more than eight million data centres globally, which not only dispose of many metric tons of hardware every year, but which also account for around one, to one and a half per cent of global power consumption, a proportion which is comparable with the level of carbon emissions of the airline sector. Experts agree that, if the technology industry doesn’t take action to reduce these numbers, it’s likely that the energy consumption of data centres could contribute more than ten per cent of the world’s electricity supply in the next ten years.

13 November 2020

By Joachim Fisher, Vertiv

It’s no exaggeration to say that uncertainty remains something of a new global currency. What does this all mean for IT infrastructure behind the edge computing revolution?

When we reflect on the impact the pandemic has had on the tech landscape, we have to acknowledge how 2020 highlighted just how central digitisation has become – both in commerce and our day-to-day lives. What did we do before Microsoft Teams and Zoom, WebEx and Skype? And what role do we foresee digitisation playing in the future?