NEW YORK -- Uptime Institute announced its newly enhanced, market-leading, and globally adopted Management & Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval. The extensive enhancements will improve clients’ ability to meet the compounding demands on their data centers, to better manage the complexities of data center infrastructure more efficiently and effectively, and to reduce operational risk by allowing them to more precisely identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in critical facilities. Participants in the new Uptime M&O program are provided with a comprehensive operations risk profile and actionable steps that drive organizational standardization throughout a site or entire data center portfolio and emphasize continuous improvement to better address the ever-evolving risks in all data center operations.

The M&O Stamp of Approval program scope includes a holistic assessment of staffing and organization practices, maintenance, and operations activities together with specific, “fit-for-purpose” management and planning protocols for use across a data center portfolio or within a single facility. The M&O program provides a roadmap to align specific organizational strategies to help clients achieve critical business objectives for their digital infrastructure, such as risk reduction, reduced downtime, and improved operational efficiency.

In today’s market, data center operations programs and procedures must demonstrate flexibility and adaptability to address a proliferation of challenges. These include supply chain issues and staffing challenges, new industry and governmental regulations, and an increasing focus on comprehensive cyber and physical security. Even more demanding is the need for data center operations to evolve to meet the still nebulous yet rapidly scaling demands required to incorporate and support new technologies such as AI, liquid cooling adoption, and the increasing power density of racks impacting the way data centers can and should be operated. Operations teams must be prepared to anticipate and respond to accelerating change, and the new M&O Stamp of Approval provides the comprehensive framework to address the ever-expanding number of challenges and risks to critical facilities.

“In this more complex and challenging environment, efficient and effective data center operations are more critical than ever,” said Christopher Brown, Chief Technical Officer, Uptime Institute. “To achieve sustainable operational resiliency, an end-to-end approach that is both nuanced and complete is required to identify potential vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and data center operational risks. The new M&O Stamp of Approval addresses both recent and evolving developments across digital infrastructure portfolios with varying deployments, whether Enterprise, HPC, Cloud, or Colocation.”

The new Uptime M&O program includes evaluation on two fundamental fronts, data center operations performance and data center staffing. In each area, proven Uptime protocols are deployed to identify risks on and across multiple levels, and in a variety of clear pathways to remediate the identified risk.

The M&O Stamp of Approval evaluates data center operations with a focus on continuous improvement across 7 key segments of operations: Personnel Management; Maintenance; Facility Management & Optimization; Health, Safety & Security; Emergency Preparedness and Response; Planning, Coordination; and overall Quality Management.

Human capital management is essential to improved operational resilience. Having the right people with the right skills is crucial to every part of the data center lifecycle, from planning to design and from construction to operations to ensure reliability and availability. The 2024 Uptime Resiliency Survey shows that 66-80% of outages are still caused by human error, with a leading factor being individuals failing to follow procedures. Ongoing assessment of the specific human factor risks in a given location and across a portfolio operation continues to be the most potent lever that organizations can use to identify and address knowledge or confidence gaps that can lead to misapplied knowledge, lapses, and failures in a data center workplace.

In the expanded M&O program, operations staff will benefit from access to Uptime’s proprietary Competency & Confidence Assessment Modeling (CCAM®). CCAM results will identify training and growth opportunities for each member of staff, whether at the time of recruitment, onboarding, or on an ongoing basis. Managers can now quickly identify risks associated with specific individuals and mitigate these by providing a customized roadmap for precision training. M&O with CCAM® provides a complete, standardized, globally recognized assessment that enables data center operations teams to perform at their best. It ensures that hidden inefficiencies, gaps in skills or understanding and the associated risks do not impact the organization.

Data centers are an ever-increasingly complex and dynamic system of active components with an absolute dependency on qualified and well-trained staff to keep them all running. While operations tasks are too often considered as just a bundle of various tactical efforts, and teams as just a collection of individuals, assuring the overall effectiveness in improving operational resilience is the single most strategic investment that can be made to protect a digital-enabled business. Failure to recognize and address the human element as an ongoing priority can derail an organization’s entire digital business service delivery strategy.

Using the principles found in the globally recognized Tier Standard of Operational Sustainability, Uptime Institute has already assessed over 1,000 data center operations programs worldwide, helping organizations independently validate the effectiveness of their critical facilities management and the operational practices of their existing data centers. The new M&O program ensures organizations can remain competitive today and reliably prepare to meet the growing challenges faced by all data centers and digital infrastructure globally.