Time to Test Your Data Center IQ

The people who run data centers tend to work in isolation. More often than not most of the people that work for a company don’t actually know what IT folks do all day inside those data centers. The issue that creates is that the people running the data centers don’t have a way to easily compare the amount of knowledge and expertise they have with the rest of the overall IT community.

To provide some insight into the relative depth of knowledge of the people who run the data center, Emerson Network Power commissioned The Ponemon Institute to launch a Data Center IQ benchmark survey of over 750 IT professionals that work in data center environments.

At the Data Center World conference in September, Dan Draper, director of data center programs for Emerson, will not only present the results of that survey but also distribute a subset of the questions asked by The Ponemon Institute to IT professionals attending his session.

“We’re going to have a lot fun,” Draper said. “There will be quizzes and trivia, and we may give away a prize to whoever scores the highest IQ.”

Draper said that rather than focusing solely on energy issues, the survey encompasses five areas that pertain to data center operations to help identify the areas of data center management that are best and least understood.

Not surprisingly, there is a significant knowledge gap between older and younger members of the IT staff in terms of depth of knowledge, with older workers tending to be able to draw on more experience to answer a broader range of questions, he said.

Of course, everyone who works in a data center generally considers themselves to be an expert in their field. The Ponemon Institute Data Center IQ Benchmark survey will enable attendees at the conference to actually put those beliefs to the test.

For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Dan’s session titled “Measuring Your Data Center IQ: A National Study on Data Center Operational Expertise and Knowledge”