United States and United Kingdom are now standing at number 9th and 10th position respectively when it comes to the ranking of top data center location in the world. Going with past record, the said nations stood at 1st and 2nd place in the same said list in year 2013
Cushman & Wakefield(C&W) which is basically an American Property Management company in US conducted a survey on world’s top data center locations and riskiest places. The company identified Iceland as the safest place in the world to host a data center, followed by Norway and Switzerland. The same survey made US and UK stand at said positions in the index.
The research also published the findings of Data Center Risk Index where Nigeria’s data center business was rated as the most risky nation among the 37 countries which were analyzed.
Every few years, C&W publishes a report designed to support data center due diligence and senior decision making when considering global investment and deployment activities. This year the results for US and UK data center markets were very much disappointing.
The survey took down the viewpoints of more than 4,000 clients on a global note and has taken into account ten factors including energy cost, water availability, average internet bandwidth, ease of doing business, level of corporate tax, and political stability. This includes the companies offering Data Center Infrastructure
The world’s Top 10 data center locations list goes as follows
Iceland
Norway
Switzerland
Finland
Sweden
Canada
Singapore
Republic of Korea
United Kingdom
United States
The top 3 riskiest markets for data centers, according to survey are
Nigeria
China (due to High Natural Disaster Risks)
Turkey and Indonesia
C & W mentioned in its report that US and UK witnessed a downfall in user share of data center services due to prevailing “Internet Surveillance Laws”.
As soon as Former NSA Contractor Edward Snowden in 2012 disclosed to the world that US was snooping into all the web and telephonic activities of its users, companies started to rely on cloud service providers who were operating from outside US. As UK started to follow US principles of internet surveillance, the same business trend was witnessed in the said nation.
Especially companies which had data centers in US and UK and depended on cloud storage services started to look for services offered by nations which were free from US and UK internet surveillance laws.
This made big cloud service providers like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Rackspace invest more on server farms outside US like Iceland, Switzerland and Sweden.
Now after 2012, when we look back at what has happened till date, a major part of loss bearers have been companies who were offering hosting services in US an UK.
Those who could manage operated their business by hosting data on other shores. Some have either opted for a private cloud or a hybrid cloud or have chosen to take the assistance of other methods to keep data out of the federal governments reach.
Thus, it proves that UK’s safe Harbor laws and US Internet Surveillance had done a lot of damage to companies offering data center services.
