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How Data Center Industries Ranked in an Analysis of the World’s Most Critical Industries

At Vertiv, we took on what many would consider a difficult task: ranking the world’s most critical industries.
We undertook this effort to raise awareness of the role critical infrastructure plays in every aspect of our lives. While the analysis had to focus on the impact of a disruption within the industries analyzed, the worst-case scenarios considered for various industries are rare and, in general, our work highlights the amazing degree of reliability many industries achieve on a regular basis. This is a testament to the experience and commitment of the professionals charged with keeping critical industries up and running.
Data centers play an important role in enabling that reliability in virtually every critical industry; however, we did not limit our evaluation to data center-related downtime. In our analysis, we considered the impact of a significant disruption regardless of cause.

Among the more than 20 industries analyzed in the report, Ranking the World’s Most Critical Industries (available at VertivCo.com/MostCritical), four can be considered data center-focused: Cloud and Colocation, Financial Services, E-commerce and Social Media.Ranking the World's Most Critical Industries In this article, we’ll highlight the results for these industries and how they compared to others we evaluated. But, first, let me briefly explain the methodology employed.

The Methodology
To conduct our analysis, we assembled a team of global infrastructure experts with expertise across a variety of industries. This team met frequently throughout the process with the first task being to develop the list of industries that could be considered critical. Our list included a broad range of industries, from the well established, such as Utilities and Healthcare, to the emerging, such as Smart Cities and Biotechnology.
Next came the challenge of determining how to quantify “criticality.” Through multiple discussions, we compiled a list of 15 criteria that could be used to evaluate the criticality of a particular industry. These included obvious factors, such as lost revenue and recovery costs, and other less obvious factors, such the amount of frustration downtime causes users and whether a disruption would be isolated or ripple to other industries.
These factors were then weighted based on their impact and severity to create a Criticality Rubric (see image) that was used by each member of the team to score each industry. Scores were then compiled to create an average score for each industry. Seven of the industries evaluated had a score of at least 600, which we established as the threshold for our final report.

Vertiv Criticality Rubric
The Results
The most highly ranked industry in our analysis will come as no surprise to data center professionals: Utilities. Despite the relative reliability of electrical power in many parts of the world, data center operators routinely invest in high availability power architectures and backup generators to minimize the impact of even the smallest disruption in electrical power. This, as much as anything, speaks to the fundamental nature of electrical power in supporting virtually every industry we analyzed.

Of the four data center-focused industries we analyzed, one was included in the list of the World’s Most Critical Industries: Cloud and Colocation. That doesn’t mean that the others aren’t highly critical, just that when all the factors in the Criticality Rubric were considered, these industries did not score as highly as others, particularly on heavily weighted factors, such as societal order depends on availability and the environmental impact of disruption.

In general, the impact of disruption in data center-focused businesses is paralyzing and expensive but tends to be limited to the organization affected. The exception, of course, is Cloud and Colocation.

Similar to Utilities, Cloud and Colocation providers have quickly evolved to become an important enabler of the businesses they serve. Downtime in these facilities doesn’t just affect the provider organization, but ripples across the customer base. This potentially widespread impact of a disruption led Cloud and Colocation providers to be ranked fifth in our report behind Utilities, Mass Transit, Telecommunications and Oil and Gas Production, and ahead of Defense and Smart Cities.

As the report points out, “Cloud and colocation providers are becoming the hub of the digital economy, and downtime can have implications that ripple through society.” As the industry continues to evolve, providers have sought to push the envelope of what’s possible with critical infrastructure. Working with infrastructure providers, such as Vertiv, they have helped pioneer new power architectures and cooling strategies that deliver higher efficiency without compromising the availability their business model depends on. Virtually every member of our team noted that cloud services are still growing in their region and expected this industry to become even more critical in the future.

Cloud data centerFinancial Services was the second highest rated data center-focused industry, just missing the cut to make the list with a score of 590. In addition to the obvious financial costs of a disruption, Financial Services rated highly in areas such as immediacy of impact (a common factor among data center-focused industries), reputational damage and industry prioritization of availability. Among data center operators, data centers that support Financial Services organizations are known for designs that integrate a high degree of redundancy, often achieving Tier IV status.

E-commerce ranked immediately behind Financial Services, based on financial losses, immediacy of impact and potential reputation damage from an outage. With all of the choices available today, downtime on an e-commerce site doesn’t just result in lost revenue, it can permanently damage customer relationships.

Social media, as might be expected, did not score particularly highly in this broad analysis. But several panelists were quick to dispel the easy stereotypes associated with social media. Downtime in social platforms doesn’t just prevent teenagers from being able to post selfies. It disconnects people from an important source of personal connections and news and has been widely used by people in emergency situations to reassure family and friends. In fact, when we looked at the results for one criterion, disruption causes angst and frustration among users, social media scored higher than Mass Transit—the second ranked industry.

The Takeaways
So, what does all of this tell us about the current state of the data center industry? First, of course, availability issues are not limited to the data center. While the world has grown increasingly digital, we are still heavily dependent on traditional industries, such as utilities, mass transit and telecommunications, which provide the day-to-day services that allow us to function in our personal and business lives.

At the same time, increasing digitization has created interdependencies across critical industries that are unparalleled. In almost every case, downtime in one industry has impacts that extend beyond that industry. The data center is becoming an increasingly important hub in this interconnected economy and that further raises the stakes for maintaining uninterrupted availability of data center services.

Finally, while each industry tends to think of itself as unique, in reality the challenges and consequences are similar across many of the industries we analyzed. The expertise developed in maintaining the availability of IT systems may ultimately prove valuable, for example, to the developers of Smart Cities as they build out the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to improve the delivery of services.
Data center-focused industries have made the investments in people and technology to achieve extremely high levels of availability. As digitization and interconnectivity continue to advance, this knowledge and experience will prove increasingly valuable.

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