In Berlin, a mother chats with her child’s doctor via a computer screen. In a Paris shop, the grocery shelves are stocked and more supplies are on the way. In Amsterdam, a student makes an online rent payment. In Romania, an ambulance is dispatched to a car accident.
All those moments – along with countless conveniences that pack daily life – nowadays happen with the help of datacenters. Purposely nondescript, these warehouses contain tens of thousands of interconnected computer servers plus the equipment needed to ensure the servers are always running, always available.
Simply put, they are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing. And across Europe, Microsoft datacenters are operating around the clock to support a wide spectrum of critical services, from the life-saving work of doctors and first responders to essential services like groceries and online banking. At the same time, datacenters also empower everyday necessities like food deliveries, remote work and video calls to family.
As Europeans brace for the possibility of a wintertime energy crisis, market researchers and energy consultants are calling datacenters critical enablers of modern society – including how they foster hybrid work schedules that reduce travel and allow office buildings to use less heat and electricity.
Despite the role datacenters play in so many aspects of people’s lives, most people don’t give them a second thought.
“Without datacenter infrastructure, which is the invisible infrastructure, will you still be able to do the things you need for working, resting and playing? Unless you’re off grid, the answer is no, you’re not going to be able to do any of those things,” says Rahiel Nasir, an associate research director at the market research firm IDC. He is based in the U.K.
“They are critical to our modern society,” adds Nasir, a member of IDC’s European cloud and cloud data management research programs.
Echoing those words, energy advisers Baringa labeled datacenters as “essential for modern society” – the top finding of a July report published by the U.K.-based consultancy.
From health care to grocery shopping, from online schools to online banking, it’s difficult to think of many corners of life that aren’t dependent on cloud services hosted in datacenters. Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams are products that rely on datacenters.
In medicine, hundreds of hospitals and clinics in Europe rely on Azure’s cloud capabilities to track patient records, schedule surgeries and engage with patients via telehealth systems. A German software company created an Azure-based solution that has helped more than 600 European health care facilities manage the work schedules of doctors, nurses and other staff.
A hospital in the Czech Republic uses Azure IoT to help monitor medication storage. In Poland, a surgeon uses augmented reality to precisely perform a procedure. And Azure hosts the public health records and the robotic medicine dispensing system for a hospital in Malta.
For urgent medical matters, Microsoft datacenters support emergency dispatch services across Europe, including 112-call systems and the mapping platforms that help route emergency vehicles to people in need and to the nearest hospitals.
In the world of money, some European financial services run their risk assessment programs in Azure, helping them make smarter decisions about where and how to invest. The cloud also enables financial trading systems, a core driver of economic markets.
In the stores, some European retailers rely on Microsoft Teams and its cloud-based collaboration functions to communicate with employees in the aisles or checkout lanes. At the back end, datacenters allow retail managers to track stock.
And to keep the lights on in those stores as well as in thousands of other businesses, hospitals and private homes, European utility providers trust datacenters to carry the critical workloads that help them manage electrical grids.
“Just looking across that list of industries and all the enablement they provide, datacenters are critical,” says Corey Sanders, corporate vice president of Microsoft cloud for industry and global expansion.
“Across almost every industry – manufacturing, transportation, even hospitality – there is some aspect of dependency, whether it be legacy services running in the cloud or modern digital transformation capabilities that have been invented in the cloud,” Sanders says.