Executive Summary

• Maintaining uptime during peak holiday demand is absolutely critical, with usage spikes, heightened cybersecurity risks, robust infrastructure, proactive monitoring and well-prepped operations teams are essential to prevent downtime.
• Data centres are the unsung heroes of the festive season, forget John McClane in Die Hard. Every online order, video call, holiday playlist and Die Hard marathon depends on them.
• From backup systems to on-call engineers working through staff shortages, data centre teams ensure uninterrupted service, so we can celebrate Christmas without digital disruptions.

Right now, most of the world is rushing around, trying to wrap up the year at work, while ordering Christmas presents, putting up festive lights, cosy-ing up with a hot chocolate or mulled wine while watching your annual Christmas movie list, while data centres are working overtime behind the scenes to keep up with our digital world and the increasing demand.

Every festive movie watched, every gift ordered online, every holiday playlist streamed, every video call with relatives, all depend on the vast digital infrastructure that runs quietly in the background so quietly that most people are unaware just how much our holiday season relies on data centre uptime.

Data Centres are the unsung heroes of Christmas

In many ways, you could say that data centres and those who run them are the unsung heroes of Christmas – and not just John McClane, who may have saved Nakatomi Plaza, but data centres keep the digital lights on for everyone else.

E-commerce platforms handle record-breaking traffic in December as more people switch to online shopping rather than braving the crowds of the general public at the overcrowded shopping centre. Streaming services face massive spikes in activity as families come together to watch their favourite holiday films. And even smart home devices, from heating to your twinkling reindeer in the front garden, rely on data centres to keep the season running smoothly.

During these intense spikes of activity, the biggest risk of systems being overloaded, especially as consumers expect around-the-clock availability so they can get all their shopping done quickly.

Maintaining uptime requires robust load balancing and scalable infrastructure, paired with proactive monitoring to actively prevent as much downtime as humanly possible. Even the shortest of outages can result in lost revenue, abandoned carts and frustrated consumers – let alone outages within healthcare, critical organisations and businesses and their potential consequences that could be disastrous.

Data Centres Face a Lot of Challenges this Time of Year

Data centres face operational challenges over the festive season, coping as best they can with staff shortages, employees celebrating Christmas and taking well-earned holiday; operations teams must plan for redundancy and have on-call engineers who have well-prepared escalation procedures to hand should the data centre experience downtime.

Not only this, but data centre operators must ensure that their infrastructure is reliable, with backup generators, UPS systems, and failover mechanisms crucial to preventing downtime.

While movies that show us heroes like John McClane saving the day or Jude Law tugging our heartstrings in The Holiday, the real unsung heroes are the teams keeping our digital world running. From e-commerce websites to streaming services, every order, message and click relies on data centres operating without interruption. This is so we can watch movies, sing our hearts out to Christmas tunes and have our hearts broken at the same time as everyone else in Love Actually… thanks to Alan Rickman.

So what we really want for Christmas… is uptime.