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Data Centers: Pros and Cons

Data centers are the new boogeyman of society, but they’re existence is a more complex issue than it seems. I worked over 25 years in tech, almost all of it as a database administrator, so I have a thorough understanding of what they do. In the old days, we used to mostly store data in powerful machines on premises. People like me would set up the computers, install the software, create the databases, and maintain backups, security, updates, and other stuff. This is an expensive way to do things for most companies, especially small businesses, since they must pay for the equipment & software as well as a staff of I.T. pros to administer it.

The proliferation of “cloud computing” changed much of the old procedure. This is where computers located somewhere around the country store your information, allowing you to get to it from anywhere you have internet access. Tech advances allowed people to share computers more efficiently, which is why data centers became a thing. Now instead of, for example, 500 companies maintaining their own computers & databases, they essentially buy time shares of powerful computers located in data centers. The data center takes care of updates, backups, and other maintainance. They are spread across the world mainly for speed. Yes, computers are lightning fast, but when you’re sending trillions of bytes of data back’n’forth daily, location matters. If you’re in Wisconsin, you can get your data faster from a data center in Milwaukee than one in California. Cloud computing is dominant nowadays. It includes OneDrive, Google Drive, email, iCloud, social media, and a ton of other stuff we use on a daily basis. So, we can’t just do away with data centers entirely. If we do, we have to deal with slower speeds and less reliability, in addition to the fact that the overall resource usage would actually go up if all those individual companies had to pay for their own on-premises machines.

However, the recent explosion of data centers has less to do with the cloud computing we all use and more to do with the proliferation of AI, as well as government-ran programs like the Flock surveillance systems. These are services that most of society didn’t ask for and doesn’t want. Plus, while data centers in general may lower resources for society as a whole, their benefits don’t outweigh the costs for local communities, which provide land, power, and water to run them.

To me, the outrage against data centers is misdirected. The resistance and outrage should be directed at the proliferation of systems that create the need for the new data centers.

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