Against the backdrop of rising infection rates globally, DE-CIX believes that its infrastructure is well prepared for the new COVID-19 wave.
The company’s crisis preparation rests on three pillars: employee health and emergency plans; automation and virtualization; and lastly, advance planning for capacity.
“The health and well-being of our employees is our top priority,” explains Dr. Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have therefore further developed existing emergency plans and security measures for the DE-CIX workforce and implemented these changes.” All employees were offered early vaccination and booster shots and were subject to working from home and separation of teams.
Expansion plans within the DE-CIX infrastructure can also be scaled back as necessary without impacting ongoing DE-CIX operations due to extensive virtualization of the infrastructure. “We've relied on automation for years, so much of our interconnection ecosystem can be maintained and monitored remotely. This means that only in rare cases is manual physical intervention required in the data centers,” according to King.
Operating in 32 locations worldwide — Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia — DE-CIX IXs form the world’s largest neutral interconnection ecosystem, with a connected customer capacity of more than 90 terabits.
“Capacity in our own network is expanded on a regular basis and for the long term. We always plan around 12 months in advance. As soon as we reach approx. 60% of existing capacities, we expand our capacities further. The remaining 40% of free capacity is needed, firstly, for redundancies and, secondly, so that we always have enough free capacity for increases in data traffic,” King stated.