Can You Count on the Cloud? 1000+ IT Pros Have Their Doubts.
The Uptime Institute’s 2026 Data Center Resiliency Survey Results hit our inbox! We do genuinely look forward to digging into the results of this particular annual survey of data center industry professionals. What decision makers are experiencing and what they expect going forward is valuable to know for people at all levels of our rapidly changing industry.
IT infrastructure pros know that there is never a shortage of pontificating about trends and futuristic projections. What we like about the Uptime Industry’s work is that it is a collection of the thoughts of a statistically valid number of people (1,035 this year) whose work occurs in the real world of technology infrastructure on a daily basis. The conclusions aren’t the viewpoint of a sponsor or the result of a couple of agenda-driven conversations. They’re the result of what is taking place in the real world.
Our two key takeaways from this year’s version of the Resiliency Survey are how few IT infrastructure professionals are convinced of the reliability of public cloud and that they expect more governmental regulation of resiliency coming down the pike.
Cloud Resiliency Doubts: Anyone paying attention is aware that public cloud providers have a spotty uptime record. That truth is shown in the results of this survey. A mere 10% of respondents agree that the public cloud is “resilient enough to run all of your organization’s mission-critical workloads,” while only an additional 24% agree that the cloud can run “most of them.” That’s just over a third of respondents expressing confidence in the reliability of the public cloud, a fairly dramatic statement on the lack of trust and confidence that those with their necks on the line have in public cloud providers.
More Resiliency Regulation: A full 69% of respondents expect that looking ahead two to three years their organization “will be subject to more resiliency regulations”. Only 3% project fewer resiliency regulations. Increased scrutiny on resiliency can be expected, as public cloud outages now make the national news, and the economic impact of an outage can exceed a billion dollars.
Those responses varied by geography. 83% of Asia-Pacific respondents see more regulation on the way. With a pro-cloud, anti-regulation administration in office in the US only 54% of those in the US expect more resiliency regulation, with Europe (72%), the Middle East & Africa (71%), and Latin America (59%) IT pros in between those of Asia-Pac and the US. As is ongoing with privacy regulations, we would expect the EU to be at the forefront of developing guidelines, which will ultimately be taken up by the US and other countries.
More Valuable Data in the Study: There is much more of interest to infrastructure professionals in Uptime’s survey and as with all of their analysis we recommend reading the entire thing.
If you are a Philadelphia-area professional and a self-evaluation of your organization’s resiliency is leading you to explore production data center colocation or DR options in Eastern Pennsylvania we welcome you to check out Direct LTx white paper Maintaining High Availability and review the nine steps suggested within.