by Alan Stewart-Brown, VP EMEA Opengear
As data centres grow in both size and complexity, organisations face a surge in costly and disruptive network outages. In the UK alone, a series of incidents has raised fresh concerns around the resilience of these critical facilities.
In 2024, the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) experienced a four-day power-related outage at its privately hosted data centre, disrupting the Automatic Licence Verification System (ALVS). Ministers said border flows were largely unaffected but the incident highlights resilience risks around outsourced data centres.
Outages have a wide range of causes, but very often they are triggered by device configuration changes, firmware or software updates that behave unexpectedly, power failures, or cyber-attacks. The consequences are significant, including lost revenue, SLA penalties, operational disruption, regulatory exposure, and lasting harm to customer trust and brand reputation.
Indications are that such incidents are becoming more frequent. In an Opengear global survey, 84% of CIOs reported more outages over the past two years. Over half of CIOs and CSOs said incidents increased by 10%–24%, while another 26% reported a 25–50% jump. Only 6% saw a decrease.
The shift to decentralised operations and distributed data environments
Adding further security challenges for businesses is the ongoing shift towards distributed data environments, largely driven by the ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT).
The massive volume, high velocity, and geographic distribution of data generated by billions of IoT devices has rendered traditional centralised architectures insufficient. This has created a critical demand for new, decentralised approaches to data processing and storage.
A key element of this is the emergence of Edge computing: the practice of processing and storing data close to where it is created, for example on a device, gateway, or local server, rather than sending everything to a central edge computuingloud.
Edge computing, and other decentralised approaches, allow organisations to process data closer to where it is generated, reducing the burden on centralised data centres and improving the overall performance of the network. However, this shift presents new challenges, not least in ensuring data security.
As businesses move to more decentralised operations, the risk of security breaches, misconfigurations, and system vulnerabilities increases. Nearly a quarter (24%) of CIOs and CSOs surveyed for the Opengear poll identified ‘data breaches’ and ‘securing API connections’ among the biggest security challenges they face in managing cloud and distributed data environments.
There are multiple causes. Decentralisation spreads infrastructure across many sites, devices, and teams, which increases the number of things that can break or be misconfigured. Policies and configurations drift between locations, while limited on-site expertise and faster change cycles make detection and recovery harder.
Finding a solution
As operations become more decentralised, organisations need stronger cybersecurity strategies that include automated network monitoring and threat detection, delivering real-time visibility and control of network performance.
Opengear’s survey results found 26% of CIOs and CSOs are prioritising the implementation of automated monitoring and management tools and 25% are investing in advanced threat detection systems to counter emerging risks. Network engineers who manage these distributed environments must also integrate new technologies with legacy systems, which 26% cite as their leading security challenge.
As hybrid environments span across on-premises, cloud, and edge computing, organisations are increasingly having to draw on the knowledge and expertise of data centre professionals with skills in edge computing and IoT integration. The Opengear survey found that 26% of organisations believe experience with edge computing and IoT integration are among the skills that will be most critical for data centre professionals in the next five years due to the rise of AI and other emerging technologies.
Engineers are strengthening protection through advanced security controls, targeted training and skills development, and partnerships with managed service providers. Together with this focus on skills and partnerships, we are also seeing technologies such as Smart Out of Band management and secure remote access becoming increasingly essential.
Such solutions can be key in ensuring continuity across all data centre environments, but they can be particularly important in Edge computing settings. Not only do they enable data centre professionals to remotely provision and reconfigure equipment at scale geographically, but they also allow for efficient daily management, maintenance, and troubleshooting of distributed networks.
As decentralised footprints expand, the differentiator is operational discipline reinforced by secure remote reach. Those organisations who can deliver availability when it matters will safeguard not only uptime but also reputation and trust.
Author biography:
Alan Stewart-Brown is VP of Sales EMEA with responsibility for overseeing all Sales, Channel Development, Marketing events and SE activities across the EMEA region. Alan brings 25 years of sales leadership experience gained across the technology sector, including Wireless LAN, Enterprise Software, BI Analytics and e-Commerce. Before joining Opengear Alan held Senior Pan-European Sales Management positions at Xirrus, Fiserv, AIM Technology, eColor and Phoenix Technologies. Alan holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Imperial College, London
