Respondents likely to invest in remote building management
or enterprise performance management solutions over the next 12 to 18 months
ATLANTA, October 5, 2021 —According to a report released today byHoneywell (Nasdaq: HON), 91% of surveyed managers have experienced at least one disruptive incident during the last 12 months, including downtime related to an outage (54%), a cyber or physical breach (38%) or unplanned downtime (34%). This likely is why respondents cite reduced downtime (33%), operational technology (OT) cybersecurity (32%), and speed or ability to predict or identify problems (29%) as improvements that would provide the greatest benefit to their stakeholders.
The report, “Rethinking Data Centers as Resilient, Sustainable Facilities,” the fifth in Honeywell’s 2021 Building Trends series, presents the challenges, priorities and assessments of surveyed facility managers across the data center sector in the United States, China, Germany and Saudi Arabia. The survey findings indicate that facility managers recognize the importance of choosing technologies that help optimize uptime, safety and energy efficiency of critical infrastructure.
“Data centers have become one of the world’s most valuable resources. They enable e-commerce, cloud computing, remote work and help businesses across nearly every industry meet growing demands,” said Manish Sharma, vice president and chief technology and product officer, Honeywell Building Technologies. “Investing in their efficiency, resilience and sustainability should be viewed not as a luxury but a strategic need.”
The survey found that uptime and cybersecurity are top concerns for surveyed facility managers. When asked about their facility concerns, respondents listed lockdown monitoring (93%); potential for downtime and closure (72%); OT cybersecurity (72%); and maintaining uptime (68%).
Investing in smart building solutions is a key focus area for those surveyed. In fact, nearly all respondents (96%) indicate remote management is (or would be) important to their facility, yet only 34% of those surveyed currently have such a system in place. Further, 38% of respondents say one of their top near-term priorities is to improve automation, efficiency or sustainability – all of which are enhanced by remote management technology. When asked which aspects of a ‘smart’ building are most important, 58% cite managing all building systems through a single platform with unified data and insights.
The survey also underscores the importance of sustainability for data centers. Over a third of respondents (34%) consider improving energy efficiency one of their top priorities over the next 12 to 18 months and 54% include the ability to reduce building energy use to support sustainability goals.
“It is crucial to reduce unscheduled downtime in data centers as much as possible,” said Sharma. “Giving data center operators better insight and control of their building and OT systems – and treating them with the same importance of the critical IT systems can help to better identify efficiencies, reduce potential outages and optimize security, fire and safety procedures.”
