CHRIS TAN Digital dilemma: Invest in resilience or risk disruption?

As loss prevention engineers specialising in the resilience of data centres around the world, we have visited our fair share of locations where fire, flood, and other disasters have laid waste to the very data and telecommunications networks that we have sworn to be dedicated to protecting.

On the one hand, we can be grateful that cabling and servers were the only assets to suffer damage, but these scenes are a heavy blow, nevertheless. The threat is everywhere. Businesses and livelihoods hang in the balance. Clients and suppliers almost definitely face some sort of disruption, and some don’t recover.

As new technologies like AI and 5G mobile services trigger a rethink on everything from medicine to how we plan holidays, extreme weather events including flooding and heat waves have become chronic. The climate stakes are rising and with it, the vulnerability of Southeast Asia’s data centres and telecommunications is coming into sharper focus than ever before.

A data boom

Data centres are technology hubs that crunch, save, and dispense the data that make the most convenient facets of our daily lives possible. Cashless payments, streaming services, video calls, and other services requiring electronic communication depend on data centres.

Demand is booming. During the pandemic, demand for cloud computing in Singapore surged. According to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, the total addressable market size of data centres and hosting services in Singapore in terms of spending opportunity is set to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.1% between 2020 and 2025.