In the mist of COVID-19 we have found digital services could be as equally as important as water and electricity.

The new way of life has shown us our reliance on digital services; services we’ve taken for granted, services we require to get our weekly grocery shop, stream movies/shows and adapt to our new way of working. In a recent article Darren Watkins, Managing Director of VIRTUS Data Centres highlights the importance of digital’s position as an essential service and its importance on our daily lives.

“The coronavirus pandemic is fast confirming digital’s position as an essential service, on par with utilities like water and electricity – required for us to live and work safely and effectively.

 

But this puts added pressure on the infrastructures of organisations responsible for making our digital applications run, as the degree of reliance on network capacity and resiliency rises. At the heart of making all of this work is the data centre industry.”

Dan Mace, EVP Data Centre, Bouygues Energies & Services feels the data centres are already designed to cope with the digital demand by pointing out:

“A data centre by definition is design, specified, constructed and tested to cope with the increasing demand and also multiple levels of redundancy and back up. We have confidence that this is achieved within our data centres due to the diligence and accuracy of the design teams who develop these complex builds to withstand the loads and stresses expected in today’s modern data centre.”

Increase of data usage

Data Centres have had an increase demand since the start of the COVID-19 crises, a report indicates from February 27th to March 31st there was a 78.6% increase of internet users within the UK alone. 

In this period Netflix had 15.77 million new customers subscribe to their services and other similar services like Amazon’s Prime Video and Disney + all showed a similar increase. 

According to a report by Forbes digital content from mobile apps, paid and free TV streaming and gaming have all seen a huge increase along with Ecommerce with so many of us doing all our shopping from the comfort of our own home. 

Data Centre infrastructure 

So what does this mean for the internet and data centres? Are we going to wake up one morning and have no internet, no online gaming, no online streaming, shopping and so on 

The answer is no. This all means there is an increase demand of the data centre industry but according to a recent article published in Data Centre Review Magazine Darren Watkins, feels the data centre industry is prepared for future demand on the industry through test and experience with power blackout, adverse weather conditions and other disruptive events. 

This is also supported by Dan Mace, EVP Data Centre, Bouygues Energies & Services who added to his previous statement saying:

“The effectiveness of the deliberate design philosophy is then proven, validated and rigorously tested by the commissioning teams using all real life potential scenarios and loads to confirm they meet the highest level of performance. With the fast moving and developing demand for data, forward projection of the future requirements is essential, the impact of this ever increasing demand is something we are constantly challenging and considering in our ever evolving data centre model.”

Dan and the Bouygues Energies & Services team have work with VIRTUS Data Centres for many years and recently been awarded the design and build for the new VIRTUS Data Centres LONDON7.