7 Tips for Choosing a Sustainable Data Center for Your Company

Sustainable data centers are essential for your company for different reasons. For one, a sustainable data center can help your company reduce its carbon footprint by increasing efficiency while decreasing energy usage. They can also improve your company’s branding, making it easier for you to haul in more clients.

Consider these seven tips to help you choose the right sustainable data center for your company.

1.  Use renewable energy

One of the goals of sustainable data centers is to provide services to companies by using energy-efficient technologies. Unlike their traditional counterparts, sustainable data centers don’t use obsolete systems; they maximize more efficient and newer technologies.

To ensure that you can get your money’s worth, assess if it is actually using renewable energy. You can do this by checking the provider’s Environmental, Social, and Governance or ESG and relationships with various organizations such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and Global ESG Benchmark for Real Assets.

Only choose a sustainable data center that is fully committed to using renewable energy throughout its operations. This will give you peace of mind knowing that you’re doing your share in protecting the environment without compromising the efficacy of your company.

2.  Look into innovation

Industrial sustainability is fast-paced. More and more technologies are emerging to help companies improve their operations while limiting their carbon footprints.

When choosing a sustainable data center, consider how innovative they are in their daily operations and how much they’re willing to invest in newer technologies to improve. Does the provider use artificial intelligence to forecast power consumption and analyze humidity to improve efficiency? Do they have an R&D department dedicated to looking for eco-friendly ways to reduce total power consumption?

The innovativeness of the sustainable data center indicates how well they can adapt to trends. This is an important feature to consider to ensure that your company doesn’t remain stagnant when it comes to sustainability initiatives.

3.  Learn more about the location

The advent of technology makes it more convenient for individuals to send and receive data regardless of their location. However, when choosing a sustainable data center, being distant or collaborating remotely isn’t the best way to go.

Because your company’s needs can change over time, it’s best if you select a data center that’s near your physical location. In this way, the providers can quickly visit your company if emergencies arise. The nearer the center is to your company’s location, the lesser risks you’ll have in experiencing downtime.

Additionally, you should also take into account how prone the provider’s area is to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. It’ll be challenging for your company to store and access data if the location of the provider is often hit by natural disasters. Instead of helping, these providers will only cause stress and problems to your company.

4.  Evaluate scalability

As mentioned, the needs of your company change over time. For instance, if your company expands its operations, you’ll likely need to store more important data in the data center.

Always consider scalability when choosing a sustainable data center. Finding and choosing a provider every time your company hits a milestone is a waste of time, energy and money. In worse cases, not being able to find a provider that supports your growth can delay your operations.

Look for a data center that offers flexibility and can support your company’s growth. Ideally, you should choose a provider that can create customized solutions based on your company’s needs on top of their standard offerings. For example, a sustainable data center should be able to store more data as your business grows.

5.  Assess financial stability

Your company needs money to operate properly and grow in the long run, which is why you should be very careful in what you invest. Choosing a provider that suddenly stops offering services due to financial issues can put all of your money down the drain.

Financial sustainability is another important factor to consider when choosing a data center. You don’t want to spend your hard-earned money on a provider that closes after a few years of its operations. Aside from affecting your company financially, short-lived sustainable data centers can also negatively impact your operations and branding.

Ideally, you should choose a sustainable data center that can support your company for at least five years. Check press releases from different sources or require financial reporting from the provider to determine their financial stability.

6.  Consider deployment efficiency

Time is crucial in the business industry. As an entrepreneur, you’ll likely want things to be done as quickly as possible to ensure zero downtime and higher productivity levels.

To ensure that you can achieve these goals, pick a sustainable data center with the highest deployment efficiency. This means that the provider should be able to test and implement new systems as soon as possible. For example, if you need new infrastructure in your company, the provider should be able to have one up and running within a few months.

Deployment efficiency is usually difficult to quantify into a specific number, so make sure that the sustainable data center communicates timelines to you. This is critical to help you manage your expectations.

7.  Use the Lemming Effect

Sustainable data centers run a business, so expect that they’ll market themselves as the best in the industry. These providers need to haul in clients to ensure that their businesses continue to operate.

To determine the reliability of a data center, consider the Lemming Effect and assess how many providers are there in the area. If several sustainable data centers built facilities in the same area, chances are, the area has good network connectivity, high-quality utility services to provide water and power and is geographically hospitable. All of these are essential to ensure that your company gets the best service from a provider.

Don’t rush, make careful decisions

The sustainable data center you’ll choose can affect your business in many different ways, so don’t make hasty decisions. Instead, take the time to compare options to assess which one suits your business’s existing and future needs.