Things in the City have been murky recently. Redundancies, reputational-damage and regulatory-overhaul have caused concern (to put it mildly) throughout the Square Mile. However, a good news story emerged about the capital when new research published earlier this week found that London’s ICT infrastructure is as ‘good as anywhere in the world’. The report, commissioned by the City of London, found the City has sufficient depth of network connectivity and enough data centre providers to offer network resilience and security to businesses. Also, from a human point of view, the skills to support the ICT infrastructure are currently a major strength of the City.

However…

…complacency is not an option as a number of challenges and threats are on the horizon. For example, the report predicts that power demand from data centres will nearly double from 2007 to 2020, which means additional electrical power supplies will be needed for data centres in and around the City. In the words of one speaker at the report’s launch, “this is a major problem” (not least because a data centre uses as much power as a “small town”, so to put it bluntly, a heck of a lot of power will be needed).

The report covers a number of other important issues for Intellect and its members, not least security and resilience, financial services, telecommunications regulation and the need to provide greater support to SMEs, so it’s worth taking a look.

Incidentally, some of the issues mentioned above will also be discussed in a forthcoming paper from Intellect’s Data Centre Group.

Technorati Tags: City of London, Financial Services, ICT infrastructure

Tags: City of London, Financial Services, ICT infrastructure

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Energy and Environment, Private Sector, Technology and Financial Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.