The Future is Now: Sustainability & Security in Poland’s Data Center Market with Beyond.pl’s Muzaffer Ege
With its data center market set to grow by a 20% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to reach $122.05 billion between 2021 and 2025, Europe is experiencing significant growth when it comes to data center colocation.
In particular, the central European country of Poland is rapidly emerging as a colocation hub, where capacity available to commercial data center customers is projected to double in the six years leading up to 2026 (see below).
Among other factors, the high quality of IT service, low price of power, and its geographical location connecting Europe’s east and west are drivers of Poland’s emerging prominence as a colo hotspot in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
Given the major advancements taking shape in this region, we sat down with Muzaffer Ege, Director Sales DACH Region of the Polish data center provider Beyond.pl, who tells us more about the headway being made in and around the country, particularly in terms of sustainable and secure data center practice.
Sustainability as a must-have in European colocation
As environmental consciousness becomes a key criterion – rather than a mere afterthought – for business decision-making, sustainable data center practice is becoming commonplace across Europe and the world.
Industry initiatives and environmental agreements are rapidly growing in membership among data center operators, which is allowing business customers – from IT giants to up-and-coming SMEs – to contribute to a greener technological future.
“Beyond.pl is proud to be the first Polish member in the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, a grassroots initiative of European data center operators and cloud platform providers, based on the principles of self-regulation, with the goal to become climate neutral by 2030,” Ege says.
“In addition to this, we are committed to a European Union initiative – the European Green Digital Coalition – to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050,” he says, where headway is already being made with Beyond.pl’s data center campus in Poznan, Poland, which is already being sourced by 100% green power.
To deliver on such ambitious goals for climate and carbon neutrality, data center operators like Beyond.pl are turning their attention to systems and processes that maximize clean energy, energy efficiency, water conservation, the reuse of waste heat and support of the circular economy.
Ege notes that many of Beyond.pl’s solutions and systems support these green outcomes and set the company’s data centers as role models, including:
- Modernized cooling and air-conditioning systems;
- Data center management systems (DCMS) to monitor and minimize energy consumption;
- Use of renewable energy sources such as wind, biomass and photovoltaics;
- Leak detection systems to quickly identify a leak location and the scale of the threat, reaction and repair;
- Control of water loss through DCMS;
- Redirection of heat generated by server rooms and their equipment to use for offices and other on-site facilities;
- Promoting electromobility for other members of the economy (Beyond.pl does this by providing charging stations for electric cars powered by electricity from wind farms on its data center campus).
As a result, Beyond.pl Data Center 2 is one of Poland’s most energy-efficient data processing facilities, according to Ege, and is powered by 100% green energy with optimal energy utilization reaching a PUE of 1.2, where market average in Europe 1.5-1.6, according to Ege.
More stringent security over customer data and the facility itself
For businesses hosting large volumes of important and sensitive company data, security has become another major consideration with the outbreak of Covid-19.
The global data center security market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 17.7% to reach $21.858 billion in 2026, climbing from $9.658 billion in 2019 to capture an increased demand for security over customer data and over the colocation facilities themselves.
According to Ege, “Both physical and data security are top of mind for customers when they choose a data center provider, for whom it is no longer enough to merely have video surveillance and an alarm system to ‘secure’ the physical facility.”
He says that new and improved data center security systems typically have a robust combination of components. Physical security alone should include video monitoring, fire detection and suppression, physical barriers, security guards, authentication and access control, and biometrics.
Significant progress is being made across Europe when it comes to facility security measures, with Beyond.pl itself boasting the first data center in the European Union with ANSI/TIA-942 Rated 4 Certificate in all four areas of: architecture, mechanics, power supply and telecommunications, which all require the fulfilment of stringent security criteria.
The potential downtime is limited to 26 minutes per year, although no downtime was experienced by Beyond.pl since commissioning Data Center 2 in 2016.
Security over the data stored within the colocation facilities should adhere to compliance standards stipulated by local or international regulatory bodies, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which provides globally-recognized requirements for information security management (ISO 27001).
Europe’s data center market in the next five years: what will it look like?
With the colocation industry expected to add nearly 2.000MW of new data center capacity annually between 2021 and 2026, of which approximately 25% will come from Europe, the scope for market expansion is huge.
Right now, Beyond.pl itself is investing into an extension of its Data Center campus in Poznan, Poland, where an almost fourfold increase in floor space will accompany a fivefold increase in energy capacity (reaching 42MWs) and 100% renewable power continuing to source the facility.
“With our ongoing expansions, our available capacity in space and power load will allow our customers to act as flexible as possible to reach, and even exceed, their expectations when it comes to sustainable and secure colocation,” Ege says.
He adds that the next five years will see sustainability continue to be something that is “very usual but nonetheless important” as more business leaders prioritize environmental impact within their decision making.
As a result, the data center industry is truly paving the way for a greener future for organizations, and is bound to continue shaping the way enterprises in Europe and around the world do business.
Want to know more about sustainable colocation in Europe?
Head to Beyond.pl’s page on Cloudscene to see what they can do for your organization, or reach out to Cloudscene’s team of experts in colocation for assistance with your next IT project or implementation strategy.
Contributor: Muzaffer Ege, Director Sales DACH Region, Beyond.plMuzaffer Ege has more than 22 years of professional experience in the data center business serving national and international customers from all verticals in international organizations like interxion, KDDI/TELEHOUSE and NTT.
In Beyond.pl in his role as Director Sales DACH, he is responsible to establish Beyond.pl’s first class Data Center services in the DACH region. He graduated from the University of Applied Sciences Frankfurt and holds his diploma in electrical engineering.
