The invisible data center

The requirements for cloud services have seen tremendous growth during 2020. As an example, the video conference app Zoom had around 10 million daily users in December 2019, today it has surpassed over 300 million daily users. The strong growth for Zoom is due to an increasing need for video conferences when more of us work outside the office during the pandemic. Another growth factor is the increasing development of IoT, machine learning and analytics that open new opportunities and set new standards for companies today. All this data being created, processed and stored will continue to grow beyond previous expectations and the demand for even more datacenter space will increase. Therefore, more data centers than ever are now being planned and designed.

Designing a data center has always been a complex matter, today even more complex than ever. To start with, companies need a new vision around environmental responsibility, lower the power consumption, shift to green renewable energy and re-use the waste heat. In addition, one must also plan for the implementation of new technology that has not yet been invented and at the same time meet requirements to build faster and at a lower cost. Meeting these demands will be considerably more difficult for companies that do not have datacenters as part of their core business.

The 100-year-old construction company YIT is on a mission to bring more life in to sustainable cities. To succeed with this mission, we need to go beyond construction and provide services for the customers of tomorrow. One of those services is “Data center as a Service” where YIT provide the customer with the benefit to be less concerned about underlaying architecture, technical complexity and environmental issues and focus on their customers’ values instead.

The “As a service concept” started in the digital world with basic applications such as CRM, timesheet services or the company´s financial system. The companies that provided this kind of services where called ASP, (application service provider). The extension of ASP is SaaS (software as a service), and PaaS (platform as a service) to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The “As a service concept” is subscription-based and bills on a “per-use” or have a monthly fee.

The demand for “As a Service” is increasing every day and for good reasons. It is considerably more difficult to predict the future demands for your services than ever before, take Zoom as an example. Using Data center as a Service will give you a high level of flexibility, combined with no capital costs spent on non-core business for your company. YIT Data center is also truly the Invisible data center when it comes to the environment. The data center uses renewable energy and re-uses the waste heat providing a net zero carbon dioxide footprint.