19 August 2025

In South Africa, many conversations about data centre resilience have tended to centre on power, but today, backup power is a given – no credible data centre provider operates without it. The real differentiator lies elsewhere, in the efficiency and precision of the data centre’s design and operations. Managing airflow, controlling humidity, building the most effective and efficient cooling systems, and planning the physical layout are all essential.

When these factors are overlooked, the consequences are serious: degraded hardware performance, increased energy consumption, higher operating costs, and potential downtime that disrupts business, resulting in revenue loss and reputational damage. Designing a world-class data centre goes beyond simply keeping servers on during load shedding; it is about ensuring they run efficiently, reliably, and within the precise environmental conditions they were built and designed for.

04 August 2025

by Harald Kriener, Head of Customer Success Management, DE-CIX

The way we work today depends not just on cloud applications, but on how well those applications work together. When we think about collaboration, our focus usually moves toward messaging or video calls. While it’s important that those applications work well in isolation, real collaboration is a much broader picture.

It’s the seamless handoff between Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and dozens of connected applications and workflows that span organizations, and sometimes even span oceans and continents. Organizations rely on these handoffs to share information, manage approvals, and stay aligned. But when those handoffs aren’t optimized and platforms don’t “talk” to each other quickly enough, the result is friction, frustration, and lost time.

07 July 2025

Power grid capacity has become a critical resource for data centers around the globe. Grid operators powering more than 9,000 data centers are increasingly hitting the ceiling when attempting to provide new connections to meet ever-growing power demand. Inadequate grid capacities jeopardize investments, sideline potential site expansions, and undermine the ability to compete in AI development.

Fast, flexible solutions are needed to cope with rising power demand for new technologies such as AI. While expanding high and extra-high voltage grids may take years, data centers can be up and running within a much shorter period of time. This discrepancy between infrastructure development and market demand poses enormous challenges for operators worldwide.