Coronavirus pandemic hit America and Europe in early January; since then all businesses shut down physically and labor has been done virtually. According to experts, data centers can sustain itself and meet service-level goals without regular maintenance for one month or two. So far, operators have surpassed that time and have been operating full capacity for as long as 4 months and counting. Data centers have done everything in their power to respond to this challenge adequately by adjusting shifts, minimizing on-site personnel, taking all sanitary measure established by the local government, only prioritizing essential maintenance work and still deliver quality solutions.
However, data centers like any other infrastructure depends on the supply chain for spare parts, fuel and more. COVID-19 has already put a toll on supply chain since all manufacturing, assembly and distribution has been suspended worldwide. If the world was to emerge from lockdown in the following months, suppliers will still have a hard time fulfilling all production expectations in time to meet demand. Although in some parts of the world and in the US, the economy will re-open slowly during May, other won’t be able to do so until maybe late June or possibly even much later than that. To make matters even more tense, scientists hope to develop a vaccine within a year; meanwhile the number of confirmed coronavirus cases just in the US keeps rising. In other words, we are facing at a possible nearly year long quarantine.
So far, data centers around the world have made an outstanding performance during this pandemic. They have been labelled as critical services, and rightly so, since all businesses from big to small, from financial to education… to mention a few, have outsourced data center services. But will these solutions hold for as far as a year in quarantine? To answer this question first we need to understand that data centers always have a disaster recovery plan in their archives and although they are not specified for a pandemic, many can be easily adapted to those cases. Second, when talking about spare parts data centers always keep plenty in their warehouses for emergencies and lastly, when talking about maintenance as long as the essential personnel meant for this job is on-site, it won’t represent an issue.
Eventually, it all comes down to how long the pandemic will last; experts have stated that the industry could recover after a six month period, this time frame is sustainable and even recoverable, but if it was to take longer than that, then we could be facing a serious problem. Stocks need to be replenished, major maintenance work needs to be done on a regular basis to ensure network resilience; one thing is for sure, the longer the lockdown goes on, the higher the risk of a possible failure. Still, data centers around the world never cease to amaze us by holding on strong, delivering reliable services to keep all businesses afloat during the pandemic. It needs to be said that data centers today are far better prepared for disasters than they were 10 years ago, so odds are in our favor; and since providers more than ever before, are aware of the great importance of their facilities, they are taking all the precautions necessaries to minimize the possibility of a network failure by keeping their infrastructure as optimal as it can be. Whitelabel ITSolutions has a powerful and robust data center infrastructure carefully built to meet your high capacity networking requirements. With our services, you will enjoy a high-density infrastructure ready for your network needs today and to future proof your growth moving forward. That’s not all, since we understand the nature of the situation with the COVID-19 that is affecting us all, Whitelabel ITSolutions has many offers to help specially small businesses.