SFE Insight | Harnessing Scotland's data centre potential, by James King

James King, Business Development Director, DataVita

One of the big challenges around sustainability for businesses is turning it from a ‘nice to have’ into a ‘need to have’. For many businesses in today’s economic environment, top and bottom lines are being tested by the cost crisis, and net zero considerations can easily fall down the agenda.

While this is an understandable response to a challenging situation, this prioritisation often follows the misplaced preconception that low carbon solutions are a cost to business. I’m here to tell you that this is absolutely not the case, and for companies like DataVita, our mission is to defeat this old cliché by boosting revenue through sustainable outcomes.

We are a Scottish based firm specialising in data storage and cloud solutions, and we have first-hand experience in delivering systems that save money and deliver emissions reductions. Take our work with South Lanarkshire Council for example. By establishing their data storage at our primary site in Chapelhall, we saved them 95% on their energy bills, and 95% on their carbon emissions. Proof if you needed it that burning dead dinosaurs is not just bad for the planet, it’s also very expensive!

That ability to do two things at once (save money and reduce emissions) is important for financial services companies. As the industry moves to a performance-based structure for net zero, individuals, development and compensation will be based on emissions reduction and what they are doing in a low carbon sense, not just what they are adding to the bottom and top lines. If we are serious about achieving net zero, we have to change the metrics by which we measure our own success.

ESG reporting standards are the mechanism by which these changes are enforced, and their importance is only going to grow in the years ahead. The sector has been adapting to Scope 1 and 2 of the Green House Gas Protocol for quite some time. While important, these are the comparatively easy parts of ESG reporting, linking directly to your business and the things you do which have emissions attached.

Scope 3 is very different. It looks at supply chain – i.e., all the things that contribute to you being able to run your business, including things that are outsourced to third parties. Under Scope 1 and 2, third party emissions were, essentially, off balance sheet for reporting requirement purposes. When this changes (and it will be changing soon!), many organisations that thought they were reaching their emissions targets will quickly be confronted with the reality that much of their carbon output has simply been moved around, rather than eliminated. Data storage is a prime example of this trend. Many big organisations store their data via largescale public cloud platforms which often rely on fossil fuel energy sources to store vast amounts of data. A major reporting headache is on its way!

When it comes to data storage, providers that can generate their own renewable energy have a huge advantage in being able to help companies measure, report and reduce their Scope 3 emissions.

At Datavita we do exactly that, powering our Scottish data centres entirely with renewable energy. Our aim is have a closed loop system, where we create and use all our own energy, using waste energy we will use that in a constructive way, such as heating our own building.

The majority of data storage takes place in and around London, and in Slough specifically, which has become the UK’s main hub for data centres. It’s currently around £10 million an acre if you want to set up a data centre in Slough, and there is a significant wait for energy provision, illustrating the huge strain we are creating by not distributing this service adequately around the UK.

The opportunity for Scotland here needs no further explanation, but I’ve already written the blog so I may as well finish! Scotland is an energy rich country, often producing more energy than it can use, and generating a record amount of renewable energy in 2022. Wouldn’t it be something special if we used some of this energy to become the next big European data centre?

We’d love to see Scotland’s world class financial services industry lead this ambition. For financial services organisations headquartered in Scotland, making the switch to a Scottish-based data centre can (you guessed it) reduce your costs and emissions. And there is an opportunity for London-based firms with a large presence in Scotland too. Of course, there are some situations where you need to be close to your data centre, such as high volume trades, but for many uses of data, such as back up and disaster recovery, there is no need to be located in the same area. The data isn’t latency constrained – using our solutions, Edinburgh to London is an 8 millisecond return journey. The carbon intensity of the national grid is also massively lower in Scotland – almost 11 times less carbon intensive than the same tariff elsewhere in the UK!

Datavita are the only Uptime Institute Tier 3 colocation data centre in the UK. Rather than a refurbished industrial unit, we have a purpose-built data centre in Chapelhall, outside of Glasgow. This means the level of resilience that we have is at a much higher level than many other cold location facilities in the UK. We can take out any part of our facility for scheduled maintenance and nothing gets switched off. Ever.

For us, it’s about screaming and shouting about Datavita, but also about Scotland’s potential as a data storage centre. We would love to see Scotland take advantage of this opportunity to develop a thriving data centre sector. If there are more data centres in Scotland, it means people have realised the potential of Scotland as the UK’s next big data centre, and that can only be a good thing.