As the frequency and severity of data center outages increases, enterprises are searching for new ways to boost their resiliency, according to a new industry survey by the Uptime Institute.

The survey found that data center operators are struggling to get to grips with increasingly complex technology and more demanding workloads, as well as a tradeoff associated with hybrid information technology infrastructure. And although two-thirds of operators polled in the survey said that distributing workloads across on-premises, colocation and cloud environments helps to boost resiliency, data center outages continue to rise.

According to Uptime’s survey, 31 percent of respondents say that infrastructure outages and incidents of “severe service degradation” have increased in the last year by an average of 6 percent. And during the last three years, almost half of data center operators reported an outage at one of their own sites or at a service provider’s.

The main causes of data center outages include human error, configuration mistakes, network failures, power outages and third-party service provider outages.

“The rapid growth in the implementation of cloud and hybrid IT approaches has ushered in a period of great change creating technology, organizational and management complexity,” Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, said in a statement. “Operators are grappling with new challenges, including increased complexity and high interdependency of systems and data centers [and] many are expecting to deploy significant new hybrid and edge computing capacity, which will support new services, but will add an additional layer of complexity in doing so.”

To cope with the new complexity, data center operators are relying on a variety of strategies, Uptime found. Almost 65 percent of respondents say they regularly backup data at a second site in case of outages, while almost half use near-real-time data replication at a backup site.

One positive from the survey is the continued growth of distributed infrastructure in the shape of edge computing, which Uptime said could lead to more efficiency as data will be processed closer to its source. That will also lead to more opportunities for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation, Uptime said.

“Edge computing is exciting because of the improved performance and scale it can offer to next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence, the internet of things and even autonomous driving applications,” Lawrence said. “We expect to see substantial growth in the edge over the next few years.”

Uptime’s survey also found that data center operators are making good progress on reducing their energy footprint. The “power usage effectiveness” metric, which is an industry standard used to guage data center energy efficiency, reached a new average low of just 1.58, according to the report.

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