Executive Summary
- Data centre resilience must keep evolving to combat increasing climate risks, in particular heatwaves and higher temperatures in the UK.
- Heatwaves and high temperates place strain on cooling systems, making them work harder to keep up and utilisng more water, which results in water stress.
- While there is resilience built into data centres from the concept and planning phases, there are still improvements that could be made industry-wide, with one potential option being more data centre regulations across the board.
Climate risks are intensifying across the world, and the pressure is mounting in the data centre industry to keep infrastructure resilient in the face of drastic weather conditions.
In the UK, the weather is worsening each year; currently, the high temperatures of summer are 10-25% higher than they would have been due to climate change.
Heatwaves are becoming more frequent, with the UK Health Alliance stating that frequent heatwaves will be more likely to occur by a staggering 50% by 2050.
Weather impact on data centres
This could have an astronomical impact on more data centres. Data centres are at a very high risk from high temperatures and heatwaves, as this places strain on their cooling systems to work better. In turn, this has a domino effect as they would need more water to continue to cool the server racks and maintain uptime. They also face extra water stress with the risk of droughts across the UK.
It’s not just the high temperatures operators need to keep in mind; while still relatively low risk in comparison, data centres are still at risk from flooding, storms and high winds. These could greatly affect cables and the power grid, even with it already being unstable due to great power demands.
Resilience against climate risks
There are several measures in place already that help data centres be more resilient against climate risks, especially since the new classification of data centres as partof the UK’s critical national infrastructure (CNI), alongside water, energy, healthcare and telecom sectors.
Data centres are regularly inspected for operational and structural issues, which is the reason why floods, landslides, storms and high winds are considered to be low risk.
There are also rigorous, widely used industry standards, which include EN 50600, ensuring the operational and design aspects of data centres are up to code. This includes the availability of supporting utilities and physical security. In the UK specifically, there are extra general standards, not designed particularly for data centres, that are followed when in planning and design phases.
This includes ISO 27001, thus setting the requirements for information security management.
There are also green building assessment frameworks, such as the BREEAM framework, that data centres must be certified in. Standing for Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, the BREEAM framework assesses the facility’s resilience to climate change-related risks.
Improving data centre resilience
As a whole, data centre sites are being designed with increased resilience, but there are still improvements that can be made at an industry-wide level.
Across the industry, standards for resilience against climate risks vary widely, and there are no standard approaches as of yet. For some, this is no more than just a routine formality, a tick on their long list. For them, it’s not a commitment to ensuring reislisnece. There is most definitely room for developing specific standards for data centres without crushing innovation or restricting the industry too much.
Data centres aren’t regulated as a distinct sector as of yet and this is a possibility that could happen to further improve regulations around resilience. If there was a requirement for data centres to be licensed or registered by a regulator, there would be legal obligations each one has to fulfill, and that would include resilience measures.
As the industry shifts, innovates and pivots with new tech, new sustainability and resilience measures and new projects in the pipeline, we will need to keep on top of maintaining resilience and being vigiliant and constantly evolving to increase resilience – and not just from climate risks, but other risks too.
