Availability has become the single most important priority for data centre owners and operators following a spate of incidents over the last 12 months that have highlighted the potential cost of any outage or operational failure. According to a recent survey conducted amongst 150 professionals by design, build and management specialist Keysource, almost half identified availability as their most important driver, with over three quarters including it within their top three priorities.

Efficiency was identified as the second most important driver with 18% of respondents listing it as their highest priority (55% in top three) and Total Cost of Ownership was a distant third with 11% (43% in top three). These factors suggest that ongoing performance remains an important consideration and is now of greater significance than capital cost (6.8% highest priority and 36% in top three), but are secondary to ensuring maximum levels of uptime. Elsewhere, security, control and M&E capacity were outlined as other key data centre priorities.

Rob Elder, Director of Keysource commented: “These findings show that data centre owners and operators are increasingly aware of the serious impact that unexpected downtime can have on a company’s performance, profitability and brand. We are seeing organisations take a more balanced view on risk and cost as well undertaking appropriate assessments and due diligence before committing to any data centre project.”