Published: June 2009 Type: Intellect report Area: Private sector
Summary
Data centres: The backbone of the UK economy aims to illustrate the importance of data centres across all sections of the UK economy, and how their growth is key to the post-recession recovery of the UK, public service reform, and the transition to a low-carbon economy. It also summarises the key issues facing the industry today, and makes recommendations to Government, regulators and industry on what cohesive action could help tackle these most efficiently.
Data centres underpin the UK’s IT industry, and its ability to sustain the rest of the UK economy. As we move deeper into a Knowledge Economy, our reliance on IT and data centres to deliver solutions and services will only increase, particularly as the cloud computing business model becomes more prevalent.
Each and every sector - from Government to financial services, via manufacturing and telecoms - relies on data centres, not only to run efficiently, but to survive. They are indispensable to projects and initiatives across both the public and private sectors, such as the National Programme for IT, the National Identity Scheme, smart metering and smart grids, to the London 2012 Olympics , the Oyster card and online banking. A lack of appropriate investment in data centre infrastructure can have wide ranging impacts on businesses and the customers they serve.
In parallel, the prolif-eration of IT is enabling energy efficiencies across all sectors of the economy. Optimal use of IT and data centres could deliver global emission savings of approximately 7.8 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2020 - equivalent to carbon savings five times larger than the total emissions from the entire IT sector, and to €600 billion of cost savings.
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