How does the Data Centre industry power the festive season?

Have you ever wondered what data centres have to do with the holiday season? For a while now Christmas has marked the start of massive online shopping events. As a result, there’s a surge in website traffic and online sales, which translates to more work for data centres behind the scenes.

For online retailers, data centre network infrastructure plays a vital role in supporting the entire customer journey. In the event of an outage, the impact can be far-reaching and result in significant losses within the retailer’s ecosystem.

During the pandemic, there was a huge spike in online shopping. Pre-pandemic sales accounted for 19.2% of retail sales in the UK equating to £75.478 billion in 2019. Rising to 28.9% (£119.640 billion) in 2021.

Video streaming and online gaming are two significant factors that also have a considerable impact on the internet.

What would Christmas be without a festive film? Streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ play a huge role in this. Netflix saw a growth of 37% in 2022 and added 26 million paid new subscribers in the first two quarters of the year alone.

The gaming industry also experienced a considerable boost as it rose by 29% during the pandemic.

This year when you sit down to watch Netflix or purchase a present from Amazon, raise a glass to the data centre networks, designers, engineers and installers who make it all possible.