From siloed to streamlined: The future of data centers

Posted: August 18, 2025

Today’s data center can’t be yesterday’s data center. Today’s demands are novel—and data centers need to respond accordingly. Since the pandemic, workforce composition has transformed: it’s increasingly remote—and younger, with higher expectations for digital accessibility and functionality such as AI. In 2025, networks have to accommodate higher traffic than ever before—as well as seamlessly integrate with mobile data. On top of these technological challenges, environmental regulations are constantly changing, requiring systems that are adaptive and sustainable. It’s an extraordinarily fast-paced and competitive industrial environment—and it’s one that’s constantly evolving.

Many of today’s data centers aren’t keeping up. According to the Uptime Institute, more than half of data centers (55%) experienced outages in the last three years—with more than a quarter of these suggesting the outage was significant, serious, or severe. When asked about the fiscal cost of these outages, more than half of the respondents indicated that such an outage cost more than $100,000.^[1]

Data centers need to be able to keep modernizing to meet the increased storage demand and computing power that a modern enterprise needs—both for the present and the future. This can be very expensive. McKinsey calculates that by 2030, data centers will require $6.7 trillion of capital outlay to keep pace with computing demand.^[2] In short, data centers built for the present and the future need both the right technology and the right organizational approach.

Increase operational maturity for a proactive response

Data centers have tried to keep up with current demands by adopting a host of applications and systems. However, these systems are not always fully integrated with each other. Siloed applications mean that the IT layer is not interacting with OT systems that teams rely on to monitor events, processes, and devices. These technological siloes and limitations result in the engineers operating these data centers, as well as the clients and stakeholders involved in them, lacking full visibility and situational awareness. They are unable to drill down on specific assets to utilize them optimally.

With a siloed system, organizations are stuck in what AVEVA calls a reactive environment. This is a situation where internal processes are all marshaled for the management of critical projects—and there is a lack of formal management tools. Projects might have budgetary estimates, but they have not been integrated into part of a larger strategic vision. As a result, when problems occur—inevitable with siloed systems composed of heterogeneous elements—the response is always focused on the present rather than also taking the future into account. This means a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money is being spent merely to maintain the inefficient status quo.

Organizations need to honestly assess their operations to decide how they can efficiently allocate their resources to optimize present and future operations. At AVEVA, we understand operational maturity goes beyond process standardization and normalizing collaboration. Centers of competency can efficiently allocate work and enable project leaders to facilitate operational efficiency. This is important, but operationally mature firms also need to ensure there is an enterprise-wide focus on the future. In the final stage of operational maturity, an organization has offices to focus on ongoing development as well as evolving mini-projects. Across the entire organization, programs work in concert to swiftly implement strategy.

This is a possible future that data center operators can make their own by working to break down the siloes among their systems and people—as well as with their clients. They can begin to reap the benefits of the operational maturity granted by increased integration: decreased complexity and cost, as well as increased uptime.

Inform decision-making with enterprise visualization

Data centers operate as the whirring hubs of myriad enterprises. A wide range of stakeholders rely on them to provide their computing infrastructure and power their computing operations. Data centers can adopt a system of systems approach to simplify and optimize their operations with single-pane visibility. This visibility means stakeholders gain both the high-level overview and detailed analysis they need to make decisions critical to their business.

When data centers unify IT and OT data systems within a single interface, they enable decision-makers to use this enterprise visualization to quickly respond to urgent situations. Decision-makers can take more informed and decisive action about present situations in real-time and the organization’s future. With visual access to energy and asset performance tools, prescriptive analytics, tracking of asset utilization and downtime, as well as risk management, teams across the data center and beyond have the resources they need at their disposal to evaluate a problem, figure out how long it will take to resolve and direct the organization’s proportionate and efficient response.

Enterprise visualization within a system of systems approach is critical to increasing the efficiency of data center operators and their stakeholders. Everyone benefits. Take the case of eBay, the world’s leading online marketplace, which wanted to reconceive its approach to data centers to increase resiliency, availability, and utility. It worked with Maya Heat Transfer Technologies and Siemens to roll out Data Center Clarity LC®, a web-based platform that enabled mobile, 3D, and web operational access for a range of stakeholders. This technology drew on AVEVA™ PI System™ data and partnered it with key performance indicators to enable real-time monitoring of operations with alarms and 3D-contextual information, providing users with intuitive dashboards—a “cockpit” view of its data centers. Not only does this view empower decision-makers to react more quickly than ever before when events now occur, but this centralized data also sets up eBay to take advantage of developing AI and ML modules to produce even more value from its data.

Increase uptime with a streamlined data infrastructure

When a unified data center successfully merges IT and OT systems to release siloed information that operators need to optimize performance, it has a holistic effect that is passed on to stakeholders. Teams are in closer contact with each other, facilitating collaboration and are also equipped with greater situational awareness, reducing cost and risk. With this new access to data, organizations can improve workflow among their employees, departments, customers, and vendors.

Take the case of PayPal, the digital payment giant, whose rapid growth led to an increasingly complex and ad-hoc system of data centers. As with many large companies, it had shifted from wholly managing its own data centers to drawing on colocation providers—and now needed a system that could integrate data from both sets of data center systems. To elevate its data center efficiency to ensure available capacity for its operations and safeguard operational stability, it turned to Casne, which integrated PayPal’s disparate systems for visualization and alerts into a single centralized solution with AVEVA PI System as its backbone.

With AVEVA PI System, Casne streamlined the data centers’ central functions. It not only created a single system for visualization and critical alerts, but also established an automatic ticket creation that used AVEVA PI Notifications to enable teams to quickly respond when an event occurs. It further augmented efficiency by populating PayPal’s Tier44 DCIM solution from AVEVA PI System’s Web API to forecast availability and enable efficient planning. This centralization has paid off: in the four years since it established this new data infrastructure, PayPal experienced only one significant unplanned downtime.   

Glimpse the future with AVEVA’s Unified Operations Center

By now, there should be no question that the way to move a data center toward operational maturity is with a unified data center that offers a system of systems approach and a single-pane graphics interface. AVEVA™ Unified Operations Center is just such a solution, empowering users to centralize and visualize the metrics affecting production, maintenance, engineering, and beyond. Vendor-agnostic, it integrates easily into any system, or systems, as the case may be. Almost immediately, it has the capacity to facilitate a clear overview of critical information for teams, enabling increased efficiency.

With AVEVA Unified Operations Center, organizations finally have the capacity to take a proactive approach against downtime, resulting in up to 15% less energy consumption and a 40% increase in operational effectiveness. The increased efficiency means organizations can expect an ROI within 18 months. In less than two years, go from siloed to streamlined.

^{[1] “Executive summary: Annual outage analysis.”  Uptime Institute. March 2024. https://datacenter.uptimeinstitute.com/rs/711-RIA-145/images/2024.Resiliency.Survey.ExecSum.pdf?version=0&mkt_tok=NzExLVJJQS0xNDUAAAGSPCeKfdv0kYTrLS-6#:~:text=Uptime%20data%20suggests%20that%20each,extreme%20cases%2C%20loss%20of%20life.
[2] “The cost of compute: A $7 trillion race to scale data centers” McKinsey Quarterly. 28 April 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-cost-of-compute-a-7-trillion-dollar-race-to-scale-data-centers}