28 July 2022
Ross Gray, CEO, Cloudsoft
The July 2022 heatwave was one for the UK record books. The blistering heat was alarming in many ways, not least the horrific scenes in north London as wildfires swept through gardens in normally quiet residential areas.
From an IT perspective, the exceptional temperatures also brought two of the UK’s highest profile data centres to a grinding halt: cloud services and servers hosted by Google and Oracle stopped working due to unanticipated “cooling issues.”
But with climate experts saying extreme weather will become the norm in the coming years, surely it’s time to anticipate these issues? In the face of unavoidable risk, we must focus the resilience conversation on how to maintain operations in the face of disruptions, including those caused by rising heat.
Our daily lives are now so entwined with digital services that even a minor outage can have a huge knock-on effect. Countless thousands of customers, large and small, were affected by the Google and Oracle outages when the technology giants shut down their systems, with no warning, to protect the stability of their entire network.
Google and Oracle made headlines because of their sheer size, and the impact of the disruption caused by their temporary shutdowns. But think about the other organisations – of all sizes – which were also disrupted by this and their own weather-related IT issues over the course of the two scorching days.
More organisations are relying on increasingly complex IT environments and digital supply chains. As a result, they are more fragile and open to disruption than ever before.
Of course, weather isn’t the only cause of operational downtime and disruption: the Atlas VPN team revealed recently that more than three-quarters of companies (76%) worldwide had experienced unexpected network downtime over the past year, with system crashes, human errors, and cyber attacks named as the primary causes.
But the wide-scale IT failures brought on by the heatwave exposed just how ill-equipped our critical digital infrastructure is in a world where temperatures of 40+ degrees in the summer will become common.
In a world of increasingly complex and interconnected digital services and systems, organisations are becoming more exposed to fragility-induced risk, and that includes the impacts of climate disruption. In February, industry thought leaders Gartner released a report calling for organisations to recognise resilience as a “strategic imperative.” Gartner highlights resilience as “the antidote to fragility induced risk” brought on by these complexities.
Resilience is particularly important for organisations within highly regulated sectors, such as financial services: imagine the unprecedented market turmoil and catastrophic effect on the economy if a major bank was shut down just because it got too hot outside?
Thankfully, regulators have taken note. The EU is developing new regulations around Digital Operational Resilience (commonly referred to as DORA), and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is taking similar steps.
On the corporate side, major companies including HSBC and Virgin Money have recently been recruiting for operational resilience staff. And, according to LinkedIn, more than 7,500 operational resilience experts have started in new roles over the past two years.
But resilience is not just about people; organisations need to build it into their infrastructure too and be confident in their suppliers. With extreme temperatures becoming the norm, companies need to ensure their critical equipment is kept at the optimal temperature range – whether that’s through increased air flow, closed circuit water systems, or even geothermal options by going underground (or even underwater!). Data centres and cloud providers are also taking steps to limit the climate impact of this enhanced cooling – for example, reducing the amount of drinking water used in cooling systems.
The record-breaking temperatures we saw in July brutally exposed just how ill-prepared even the largest organisations’ digital infrastructures are to deal with climate change. Every organisation should view July’s outages as a stark wakeup call to ensure their IT is robust and prepared to survive the hotter summers.
As extreme weather becomes more routine – and companies continue to expand their IT estates and become more fragile – we can expect to see more outages and disruption across all sectors. Every organisation must take steps to address its vulnerabilities: the economic, reputational, and operational costs are too severe not to.
