Originally posted on Data Center POST.

By Michael Zrihen, Senior Director of Marketing & Internal Operations Manager at Volico Data Centers

Data center reliability is crucial to sustaining today’s digital operations, where any amount of downtime has financial and reputational consequences. Fortunately, outages have been becoming less frequent and less severe throughout the past few years, but the consequences are still bitter when they happen. Even the shortest disruptions can cost thousands, and with the expected increase in data volumes, data center uptime will remain cardinal in enabling critical applications and services.

There can be so many causes and reasons behind a data center outage that threat mitigation has to follow a structured strategy to address them. The Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis report reveals the most crucial challenges affecting data center uptime last year, showing the areas that require the most attention from operators.

This blog dives into today’s most critical challenges of data center uptime and the best ways to mitigate the risks to deliver uninterrupted performance.

What Are the Most Prominent Threats to Data Center Uptime?

Despite their bad rep, cyber attacks and extreme weather events are NOT the topmost causes of downtime last year. Yes, these can be extremely costly unplanned events, but if we look at data center uptime specifically, there are other, more prominent causes of failure. Identifying these is crucial to preventing disruptions from happening again. Data centers are very intricate systems where many elements can become vulnerabilities. The direct cause of failure is often impossible to predict or prevent, however, the underlying causes often point to the lack of sufficient redundancy and human error. These invisible threats can set off and culminate in an outage. Knowing the root cause is important because the insight can help mitigate future risks and achieve better data center resiliency and performance.

For the past few years, power issues have consistently been the number one cause of severe outages. Power disturbances like overvoltage spikes, fluctuations, or blackouts heavily impact the hardware, causing shutdowns.

According to Uptime’s report, the next most common cause of outages is cooling failure, followed by issues connected to third-party providers and network-related problems.

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