Each quarter, Cloudscene reviews the 5,500+ service providers listed on its global directory to determine the top ten data center operators across North America, EMEA, Oceania and Asia. Based on data center density and connectivity, the quarterly leaderboard offers an independent insight into the top players in each region (see Q3, 2017 Leaderboard results).

At the time of revealing the top data center operators in our quarterly leaderboard, we also release a list of Fast 50 tech companies based on specific criteria. Last quarter we took a look at growth, and this quarter we’ve focused on an area of critical commercial importance: resilience.

In the world of data centers, resilience is considered “the ability to maintain ICT service in the face of environmental extremes as well as human error or deliberate sabotage”*.

The causes of downtime were revealed in a 2016 report by the Ponemon Institute, which found human error to be the second most common reason for data center downtime, accounting for 22% of all incidents. This follows Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) failure which is the number one reason for data center downtime.

Cyber crime was the fastest-growing cause of outages, rising from 2% in 2010 to a concerning 22% in 2016. Whilst data center outages are somewhat common, they are also incredibly costly. In fact, downtime can cost enterprises an average of US $740,357 per outage or a staggering $11,000 a minute for e-commerce companies according to the same study conducted by Ponemon.

With this in mind, Cloudscene took the opportunity to review the Uptime Institute certifications for over 150 top global data center operators listed on our cloud directory, specifically with respect to: