InetServices offers both Windows and Linux bare metal server hosting, and cloud server hosting for any small to medium size business. We also offer both PCI and HIPAA Compliant servers allowing you to achieve PCI or HIPAA Compliance without all the worries of figuring it out. InetServices offers much more than just dedicated servers and cloud servers, we offer you a complete solution to your hosting needs including Big Data, Disaster Recovery, and High Availability services.
What comes to mind when you think about summer? Swimming; going to a cabin; camping? Sipping a cold drink on a patio? For me, it’s not summer without HostingCon Global.
The must-attend event of the year is just around the corner and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a great opportunity to see former colleagues, meet new peers, and get a taste of what’s on the horizon in terms of technology, new business models, and industry changes. If you’ve worked in hosting for a significant amount of time, you know how vastly different the industry looks today than even a few years ago. Attending HostingCon helps me understand some of those changes and how companies like yours are weathering them.
For the third year in a row, the WHIR is hosting a special edition of WHIR Events at HostingCon. This event is the most popular of the year and spots fill up fast so be sure to RSVP as soon as possible. The event runs from 7:30 – 10:30 p.m. on July 26 at Fulton Alley. (Don’t forget your business cards!)
If you haven’t signed up for HostingCon Global yet, there is still time! I’d love to see you there. If you’ll be there and want to meet, please give me a shout at nicole.henderson[at]penton.com.
See you in New Orleans! Make sure to pack your shorts. I’ve heard it can get quite warm in Louisiana in the summer.
Partner Compatibility Strategies for MSPs, CSPs, Hosting and Other Service Providers
Managing The Vendor Mix and Vendor Types For Your Go to Market Model: Part one of two part series.
As the mix of cloud services increase beyond IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, service providers continue to evaluate partnering strategies and vendor relationships as a competitive differentiator. New end customer demands call for an increase in the number of different cloud services and an immediate expected integration between these services, including toolsets, monitoring, management and analytics.
Getting the vendor mix right is a critical priority, or providers risk future challenges with service delivery, service quality, and, ultimately, customer loyalty. From the client point of view, service providers first line of offense and defense, and any issues or challenges often fall to the MSP, not the vendors they partner with.
So how do MSPs, CSPs and other service providers decide which vendors to choose, and what is the right mix? If partnerships are rushed into without careful consideration, providers may experience relationships that do not produce an ROI or do not generate new business. TCC research shows that 50-60% of vendor partnerships do not get off the ground after contract signing.
One of the most significant opportunities is getting the business strategy and vendor mix right.
Often times, a strategy session is needed to map out the solutions offered and the verticals in which success is experienced to uncover where the opportunities for growth. Helping clients make the transition from on premise to cloud continues to be an incredible opportunity; assisting customers in determining what they need to do for sustained success in the cloud is more and more important.
Specialized new cloud-based services are emerging every day. Sometimes these specialized vendor players can make a huge impact on our ecosystem; or it’s an industry with a new cloud offering that can best assist us.
Building and prioritizing key growth areas for new services is essential. Take for example, some of the more interesting services highlighted in a recent post in MSP Mentor.
7 Managed Services Offering Trends to watch in 2016:
Remote monitoring for BYOD policies and protection Enterprise Mobility Management for mobile devices Internet of Things for everything connected Identity and access management for two-factor authentication Cloud backup services for data protection Compliance as a service for meeting regulatory compliances Remote monitoring and management
Building a rich and trusted ecosystem with the right mix of partners is essential:
Hardware and Software Vendors Service Provider Vendors Contracting Services Companies Two Tier Distributors Other Managed and Cloud Business Service Companies
Combining the right relationships from the right types of partners enable our customer base, differentiate us from our competition and enable our top line growth.
In addition to technology, product and solutions, here are some other considerations.
It’s important to evaluate the entire “partnering experience” with the vendor. What is the commitment the vendor has to the channel? Would this new vendor put us in the position to have to balance a potentially competitive relationship? Will we need to consider competitive aspects, either with another partner or vendor in our ecosystem, or with a vendor’s direct sales organization? When these competitive situations arise, how will we manage ongoing successful sales engagements?
To fully consider our vendor mix, we need to have careful considerations in all facets of this relationship including:
Vendor Strategy Vendor strategy ideally lines up with go to market strategy and existing services offerings. Do service providers choose go with many different, smaller best of breed partners, or one large significant player that can offer many different services? There are pros and cons with both strategies. Providers should evaluate the exact value proposition, the verticals served and what benefits can be expected from the different strategies, then make a choice.
Vendor’s Partner Experience What is the partner experience like? Are they a partner-centric organization where all of their business is done with partners, or do they also have a direct sales organization? What percentage of their revenue is done with partners? Also look at partner program features: cloud programs, like deal registrations, conflict management policies, partner account managers, support and executive sponsorship. Can we gauge the level of their partner commitment by looking at their website and other public-facing materials? Do they have a vibrant partner ecosystem themselves? If partners are not a priority for them, then it may be tough to get the partner experience needed to be successful.
Partner Program Service and Support Model From what we know about the vendor’s program, what is the expectation for training and certifications and what is the method and quality of their training programs? Some of the smaller players might not be as mature as the bigger market leaders, but what is really important to the business?
If there is a clear and defined onboarding and ramping plan, can service and delivery teams get what they need out of it and for what investment? Ultimately, will we be able to profit from this program, or will we struggle to even come up to speed for the investment cost estimates?
Quality of Service and Support When considering any vendor, providers must look at their overall quality of service and support. This is the time to really test the extent of their technical and sales support. Are the vendor teams quickly available on the phone, or does it take 10 minutes just to get someone live? How well is the vendor staff trained and ready to help? Explore and test-drive the tools they offer, the online capabilities, community supported knowledge base and any analytics they offer.
When we are live with a client solution, we need to be sure we have a partner at our side.
Compatibility Consider compatibility with the other services offered. The tight integration between service offerings will directly affect the services delivered to clients. Do the vendors together offer interoperability certifications or programs; are there reference architectures of different service offerings on which to capitalize?
Marketing Support As you continue to build out your brand, will the vendors aligned with support that goal? Within their program, does the vendor offer marketing support? If so, what type and extent are they willing to help? Will they provide content for marketing efforts? Are they going to help with lead generation, or even pass on leads? What kind of extended support or concierge services can be expected from them? The extent of the support given here will directly impact the entire vendor experience.
The last key area is ensuring the vendor also fits well into the business’ broad partner ecosystem around cloud services.
This brings us to another key area in the go to market model: building out the ecosystem. Not only will it stand to differentiate the provider in the marketplace, it also creates space for a significant trend in this industry, which is, partners, within the same ecosystem, partnering together.
Collaborations between MSP or cloud partners can strengthen offerings and increase competitive position. When new solution offerings are built, it may create opportunities for complementary partners and services to work together.
For example, I was recently at a conference and led a discussion about security. Two MSPS; an integrator focused on storage and networking explored the opportunity to partner with a highly oriented security and compliance as a service MSP in completely different geographies of the country. This example highlights how MSPs and solution providers working together can be a strong value proposition with the right negotiated terms and rules of engagement up front. .
Having collaboration, trust and unified goals to ensure alignment, along with a customer experience that is supportive, smooth and very successful, are key for these relationships’ success.
That is just one example. Service providers could have on premise solutions collaborating with cloud services, analytics services partnering with compliance services or hosting partnering with communications.
Whatever the mix, having a common set of goals, and building a track record of successful clients will strengthen the overall proposition and ultimately our ecosystem.
This post explored the overall vendor mix and compatibility strategies when building an ecosystem, what they might look like and some of the challenges in building our vendor/partner relationships. In part two of this series, we will look at the best practices in managing vendor/partner relationships and successful ecosystem communication strategies.
Join me at HostingCon July 24-27 to explore partnerships in even more depth.
AWS Sweetens Developer Pitch with Cloud9 Acquisition
Brought to you by Talkin’ Cloud
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired cloud development startup Cloud9 on Thursday. The details of the transaction have not been disclosed.
According to a report by Fortune, Cloud9 has built an integrated development environment. It offers a code editor with a full Ubuntu workspace in the cloud. The platform supports more than 40 languages and allows developers to build and test websites using WordPress, Django and Rails.
The developer market is a huge focus for cloud providers, and this acquisition will certainly help support AWS’ pitch to developers. It is unclear exactly how AWS will utilize Cloud9 or its technology.
According to a brief blog post on Thursday by Cloud9 CEO Ruben Daniels, the company will work with AWS on “terrific customer offerings for the future.”
“On the occasion of this amazing milestone for Cloud9, I’d like to take this moment to express our appreciation for the trust you’ve placed in Cloud9 over the years and to say how excited we are at this new beginning and the opportunity to bring you more and more value under the AWS umbrella,” Daniels said. “Thanks so much for your business, and stay tuned for even more great things to come!”
The startup is based in both Amsterdam and San Francisco with less than 50 employees.
“The workspace automatically communicates with the Salesforce platform to synchronize any changes you make, allowing you to fully focus on coding,” Cloud9 said.
Can Pied Piper Really Afford HPE's Composable Infrastructure?
Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge
With Starbucks and Apple logos so common in movies and TV shows that they’re practically unnoticeable, product placement for enterprise technology is the hot marketing challenge of the day.
As we ROFLed watching the season-three finale of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, it was hard not to notice the gigantic black rack bearing a green rectangle sitting in the cluttered garage of the Pied Piper/Bachmanity headquarters that doubles as the startup’s data center and triples as Jared’s bedroom.
HBO’s brilliant satirical take on the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene is where converged infrastructure vendors have found their perfect place for product placement.
But compared to the subtle appearances of SimpliVity’s OmniCube on the show – that’s what the much dreaded “box” Pied Piper was forced to build by its promptly ousted CEO Jack Barker was based on – the appearance Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Synergy on the season finale is a rather clunky feat of enterprise product placement.
The show generally gets things right about tech, the business and the technology. As we’ve pointed out before, it has been fairly spot-on on the data center side of things too, so it was puzzling to see HPE’s latest and greatest in data center gear, its composable infrastructure machine, sitting among the more fitting mess of servers, cables, milk crates, and tool shelves Gilfoyle had concocted to support the startup’s IT requirements earlier.
Pied Piper is out of money at this point, and it’s hard to believe it can afford HPE’s latest iteration on converged infrastructure, let alone one whose official shipping date is unclear at the moment. Besides, hasn’t Pied Piper already migrated to the cloud?
You can see the HPE Synergy rack briefly in the beginning of this promo clip for the season finale:
Microsoft Wins Big in Fight for User Privacy as Irish Search Warrant Found Invalid
Microsoft won a huge victory in the name of user privacy on Thursday as an appeals court has ruled that a federal warrant to seize email from a Microsoft server in Ireland is invalid.
Federal investigators received a warrant for email contents as part of a criminal investigation in December 2013, touching off a debate between the tech industry and law enforcement about jurisdiction and data storage.
In a statement, Microsoft said: “We obviously welcome today’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision is important for three reasons: it ensures that people’s privacy rights are protected by the laws of their own countries; it helps ensure that the legal protections of the physical world apply in the digital domain; and it paves the way for better solutions to address both privacy and law enforcement needs.”
Privacy protections for information stored on paper should persist as data moves to the cloud. This decision helps ensure this result.
The second appeal has been upheld by a panel of three judges sitting for the US Court of Appeals Second Circuit, who ruled that: “(Subsection) 2703 of the Stored Communications Act does not authorize courts to issue and enforce against U.S.‐based service providers warrants for the seizure of customer e‐mail content that is stored exclusively on foreign servers.”
Representatives for lobby groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the i2Coalition, and for tech companies including Rackspace, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon, as well as for Ireland the European Parliament all submitted briefs in supported of Microsoft’s position.
“We conclude that Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially,” the judges said in the ruling (PDF). “The focus of those provisions is protection of a user’s privacy interests. Accordingly, the SCA does not authorize a US court to issue and enforce an SCA warrant against a United States‐based service provider for the contents of a customer’s electronic communications stored on servers located outside the United States.”
The ruling also pointed out that Microsoft had already produced “non-content information” that was stored in the U.S.
The Seattle Times reports speculation by lawyers following the case that the government would appeal the appellate decision if it lost.
The Rackspace support team for AWS has surpassed 300 professional and associate AWS certifications, according to an announcement by the company this week.
Demand for cloud skills in general, and AWS skills in particular, continue to outpace supply, despite the gap being well established. With a globally distributed team that includes AWS certifications for DevOps Engineering, SysOpsAdmnistration, Development, and Solutions Architecture, Rackspace said it provides the footprint and skills necessary to leverage AWS.
“Our customers come to Rackspace for Fanatical Support and our standard is to serve those customers with 100 percent AWS certified technologists,” Chris Cochran, senior vice president and general manager of AWS at Rackspace said in a statement. “To meet customer demand, we have more than doubled the number of Rackspace AWS certifications since the launch of our offering in late 2015.”
Rackspace began offering Azure and Office 365 through its partner network earlier this month, on the heels of a report suggesting Azure is gaining market share rapidly on AWS. Rackspace also began offering managed Magento environments on AWS in June.
LeaseWeb USA Promotes COO to CEO to Lead Next Chapter of Growth
Lex Boost has moved from chief operating officer to chief executive officer of LeaseWeb USA to lead the development and execution of its vision and growth strategy, the company announced Thursday. Boost replaces outgoing CEO William Schrader, under which LeaseWeb USA’s revenue grew nearly 10X, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Before working at LeaseWeb USA, Boost was actually a customer. Mobile Broadcast Company, which Boost founded in the Netherlands in 1997, had offices in the same building as LeaseWeb, and selected it as host. While Mobile Broadcast Company became Service2Media and subsequently filed for bankruptcy, Boost joined LeaseWeb as global operations director in 2014. Service2Media eventually became a subsidiary of app developer OneSixty, which was acquired in 2013 by Dutch telecom CM.
After serving briefly in that position Boost moved to the U.S. to become COO of LeaseWeb USA. With LeaseWeb USA, Boost led the opening of new facilities in Dallas and San Francisco, as well as the integration of Nobis Technology Group and its Ubiquity Hosting brand following its acquisition in March.
“Lex is well prepared for this new role, where he’ll be focused on increasing LeaseWeb USA’s rapid growth in the U.S. market while bringing the spirit of the Amsterdam company to our customers there,” Con Zwinkels, global CEO of LeaseWeb said in a statement. “Lex’s extensive experiences as an entrepreneurial technology leader will help us continue to bring our winning formula of secure, affordable cloud-hosting solutions to our customers.”
“LeaseWeb USA is backed by one of the world’s largest hosting providers, but operates in the United States as an agile provider of innovative solutions,” said Boost. “It’s been a tremendous opportunity to work in a place with that mix of boldness and capacity. I look forward to continuing to use my entrepreneurial passion and knowledge of the U.S. market to lead LeaseWeb USA toward greater accomplishments.”
Logicalis has announced the appointment of Sally Brandtneris to the position of chief financial officer (CFO) in the United States. In this role, Brandtneris is responsible for maintaining sound day-to-day fiscal management and controls, including the executive direction and oversight of finance, accounting, tax, and IT functions, as well as Logicalis’ banking and auditing relationships. She will also direct financial strategy, planning and forecasting in concert with the CEO and executive team and will lead the organization in making strategic, market-leading investments. Brandtneris is based in Logicalis’ Bloomfield Hills, MI, office.
“The addition of Sally Brandtneris to the Logicalis management team comes on the heels of the company’s recent sales and profit growth. Sally has led financial operations for a broad range of Fortune 500 and multinational companies across technology and industrial industries. Her strong technology background and financial leadership experience will serve Logicalis well as we help our customers transform their businesses into digitally enabled enterprises,” says Vince DeLuca, Logicalis US CEO.
“This is an exciting time for organizations across every industry as they undergo intensive transformation in their business models. Logicalis is at the forefront of providing technology and business leadership, consulting and guidance to IT organizations in transition,” says Brandtneris. “I look forward to delivering financial guidance and innovation to help the Logicalis leadership team achieve its business objectives.”
Brandtneris has 35 years of financial leadership experience in a variety of industries including the IT industry. She has held positions with Eaton Corporation, Ingersoll-Rand, Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer, and IBM. Most recently, Brandtneris served as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Stefanini IT Solutions where she provided financial leadership for 30 Stefanini entities that were geographically dispersed across Asia, Europe and the Americas and organized under a UK holding company, fully owned by a Brazilian entrepreneur. As the financial leader of the UK holding company, Brandtneris restructured the Latin American, European and Asian legal entities and achieved UK audit and tax compliance, reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). She also developed strategies to put in place a more effective tax strategy and modify the company’s capital structure. In 2015, Brandtneris was named a finalist for the “Crain’s CFO of the Year Awards” annual competition conducted by Crain’s Detroit Business.
Brandtneris holds an MBA in Finance and Accounting from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and French from the University of Michigan.
Big data and elections: The candidates know you better than you know them
With the presidential nominating conventions looming, the candidates are getting ready to add to the hundreds of millions they’ve already spent to tell you about themselves — but only what they want you to know about themselves.
Meanwhile, they have also been spending millions of dollars collecting information about you — and you have no say in what is collected.
Which means that, in the era of big data, if you’re a potential voter, they know a lot more about you than you know about them.
The desire to know what will turn a voter to, or from, a candidate is not new, of course. Campaigns have been chopping up voters into interest groups for decades — minorities, gays, blue-collar workers, soccer moms, the religious right, progressives, boomers, NASCAR dads, union members, retirees, the rich, plus a host of occupational groups ranging from health care to law to the food and beverage industry.
They have been tracking voting history, political contributions and volunteer history as well.
But the information being collected now is much more, as they say, “granular.” It includes social media — everything from “friends” and “likes” on Facebook to YouTube views, LinkedIn profiles, activity on Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and Reddit to who a person follows on Twitter, or who they retweet.
It includes magazine subscriptions, the types of cars or boats they own, where they shop, charitable contribution history, memberships, where they live, whether they rent or own a dwelling, whether they have a vacation home, permits and licenses, own a gun, and more.
All of which is designed to help candidates “micro-target” their message to groups of voters. They call it better communication, although it has an obvious element of manipulation to it.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist, the Center for Democracy & Technology
“It can be as simple as swapping out a phrase that might have been found to be more appealing to one kind of voter, via focus groups, etc., or more complicated things like changing the visual demographics or traits of people appearing in ads,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
Josef (Joey) Ansorge, New York attorney and author of “Identify & Sort,” which includes a focus on the political implications of big data, said the ZIP code is among the most important pieces of information collected because, “where they live, where they work and where they went to school tell us a lot about individuals.”
When it is correlated with information gathered from contacts, then, “calls or visits inform the campaign how an individual is tending to vote.”
Josef (Joey) Ansorge, New York attorney and author of Identify & Sort
This, he said, lets campaigns create “micro” groups of voters, the most important of which is those considered “sway-able.” Obviously, that is the group the campaigns will try the hardest to influence.
But such detail about people’s lives, preferences and opinions — even their personal health — also raises both privacy and security concerns. How many people have access to it? How well is it being protected from online attacks? Will it be discarded after the election is over, or kept indefinitely? Could it be used by those who get elected and want to track those who supported their opponent?
Ansorge has a problem with using big data to send very different messages to different groups. “There is an elemental universalism to democracy that is undermined by these kind of practices,” he said, adding that he thinks voters ought to be made aware of how campaigns feed them information based on their profiles.
Andrew Hay, CISO of DataGravity, said he is not overly concerned about the collection of voter data itself, or even the tweaking of the message. “Candidates have a lot of information to remember, and the analysis of data simply helps them match the needs and wants of clusters of voters to a particular message,” he said.
But he said data security and governance is crucial. “I’m less concerned about the government keeping a ‘burn list’ of clusters of voters and more concerned with the protection, retention, and destruction of the data collected,” he said. “This includes raw data as well as any derived analysis from said data.”
Andrew Hay, CISO, DataGravity
That is also the view of Brenda Leong, senior counsel and director of operations at the Future of Privacy Forum. big data analytics offers, “great new ways to engage with voters on the things that really matter to them, which results in more motivated, and hopefully better informed, participants in the electoral process, and likely higher turnouts on election day,” she said.
But she said “proper handling of the data” is not always easy for campaigns that tend to ramp up quickly from nothing to, “multi-million-dollar — even billion-dollar — enterprises, made up with large sections of volunteers or temporary staff.
“Every campaign needs to treat security and privacy needs seriously, and have meaningful training for workers. We strongly recommend that every campaign have a chief privacy officer to monitor just these issues,” she said.
Brenda Leong, senior counsel and director of operations, Future of Privacy Forum
Ansorge agrees. “These databases have afterlives that are not under the control of the government or the party,” he said. “There is always a risk of abuse, by domestic and foreign actors. Here there is a perfect storm of data collected for a specific purpose potentially being abused for another.”
Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that it is more than just potential. Just three weeks ago, MacKeeper security researcher Chris Vickery discovered that a client of the data brokerage firm L2 was hosting a database with 154 million U.S. voter registration records and, “leaking information on a dizzying array of intimate details, including gun ownership, Facebook profiles, address, age, position on gay marriage, ethnicity, email addresses and whether a voter is ‘pro-life.'”
That wasn’t the only case. Six months earlier, Vickery discovered a “misconfigured” voter database with 191 million voter records — including his — that was, “just sitting in the public, waiting to be discovered by anyone who happens to be looking,” according to CSO’s “Salted Hash” columnist Steve Ragan.
Vickery told Ragan he was outraged to see his own record with, “details that could lead anyone straight to me. How could anyone with 191 million such records be so careless?”
Yet another breach, of 56 million records, included 19 million profiles that had not only voting history but also personal information like “Christian values, Bible study, and gun ownership.”
Hall said those cases, along with nation-state hacking of campaign information systems, make it obvious that voters should be concerned about the data collection of modern political campaigning.
“Campaigns only seem to care about the security of data when they’re protecting it from their political rivals,” he said. “Voters should be especially concerned because there are zero repercussions for campaigns mistreating or improperly protecting these data. The FTC has no jurisdiction over non-profits — there are serious First Amendment problems with government telling political speakers (campaigns) what to do.
“And there is zero chance that politicians will pass laws that reduce their capacity to micro-target, even if it means more robust protection of voter data.”
Beyond that, political databases are more likely to be hacked because they are shared more than those collected by commercial companies. Leong noted that, “companies routinely promise not to share your data, but campaigns and political advocacy organizations share data as a standard, so reading the disclosures or policies when submitting data is more important than ever.
“If you sign up for a particular cause or issue, that organization is likely telling you that they intend to share that information with ‘like-minded’ organizations, and you will end up on the mailing list for multiple causes,” she said.
Hall agreed. “If you donate to a campaign, one of the first things you see — and will see periodically after that — is a ‘We’d like to get to know you better!’ survey,” he said, adding that they will seek information on things like gun ownership and views on abortion, “that the campaign can’t easily infer or purchase from other sources.”
He said even when voters volunteer that information, he is not sure they understand that it is used to get, “highly granular information about the voters for targeting, and in a number of cases this year, to get information about households around a given voter’s address that might not be as forthcoming or politically involved, such as, ‘Do you know if any of your neighbors are gun owners too?'”
Ansorge said he thinks it would not be too difficult to create laws to limit data collection, especially governing presidential campaigns. “Candidates would self-discipline and would not want to create the potential scandal of their campaign being identified as law-breaking.”
He said voters could decide to give more of their personal information to the campaign they support — “we could think of it as donating your data,” he said — but the choice would be up to them.
Given the detail of the data collected, there is general agreement that there should be regulations on destroying it after a campaign ends.
Hay recommended that the U.S. adopt something like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, “specifically the Right to Erasure (right to be forgotten) language.
“If, as a citizen, I give consent to my data being collected and used in this manner I should also have the right to request what has been collected and the right to have it erased,” he said.
This story, “Big data and elections: The candidates know you better than you know them” was originally published by CSO.
Report: US No Longer Lowest-Risk Country for Data Centers
Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge
There are more data centers in the US than anywhere else, and until at least three years ago, building a data center in the US was less risky than building one in any other country. According to recent risk analysis of global data center locations by a real estate services firm, however, that’s no longer the case.
US ranks third in electricity costs, fifth in ease of doing business, 15th in available network bandwidth, and 36th in corporate tax environment. These and six other characteristics add up to US being the 10th least risky data center location today, according to the firm.
The same report, Cushman & Wakefield’s Data Centre Risk Index, put the country at the top of the list just three years ago. Since 2013, US has been overtaken by four Nordic countries, as well as Switzerland, UK, Canada, Singapore, and South Korea.
The index ranks countries based on 10 factors that have a bearing on the level of risk for building and operating data centers. Different factors affect a country’s overall ranking to different degrees. GDP per capita, for example, doesn’t have nearly the weight of the likelihood of natural disasters, and water availability isn’t as strong a factor as political stability, or energy security.
Considering all 10, Iceland is the safest data center location bet you can make, followed by Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden, filling out the top-five in that order. Canada ranks sixth, followed by Singapore, South Korea, and the UK.
The report looks at 37 countries Cushman considers either major or emerging data center markets. It’s based on a survey of thousands of data center operators around the world.
So, what is it about Iceland that makes it such a safe haven for data centers? According to the report, the country ranks high in availability of renewable energy and water, low risk of natural disasters, political stability, low energy costs, and corporate taxes. It’s also better than many others in terms of connectivity, ease of doing business, and GDP per capita. Iceland ranked 22nd in energy security, its lowest ranking among all categories.
Risk, of course, isn’t the only thing driving data center location decisions. It is one of several variables itself, the other variables being things like proximity to end users and the ability to improve customer experience. While there are data centers in Iceland, there are relatively few of them.
Proximity to users remains a huge consideration, but corporations are also increasingly concerned about political stability, risk of natural disasters, and energy security when weighing data center locations. All three have surpassed traditional considerations like cost and connectivity in priority, according to the report. Collectively, these three factors now account for one-third of the overall decision, “implying a level of emotional sentiment throughout the survey following a number of major incidents over the past few years.”
The latest example of such an “incident” happened just recently, months after the survey was conducted. It’s unclear whether the UK’s current ranking on the index (it’s in the ninth place) would be different had the report taken into account the country’s vote last month to exit the European Union.
In a statement, Cushman’s head of London markets, Digby Flower, said real estate occupiers in London with strategic plans “will move slowly,” following the Brexit referendum, referring to the real estate market in general. There are signs, however, that demand for data centers as a subcategory of the real estate sector is less affected by Brexit than the category as a whole.
