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Bob Mostachetti is director of partnerships at Planon, a building management systems and integrated workplace management systems software company. The opinions are the author’s own.
The job of a facility manager no longer looks the same as it did 10 years ago. Today’s buildings are more complex, their compliance burden is higher, and their tolerance for downtime is lower. Nowhere is this more true than in data centers, where the challenge of facility management exceeds the tools most operators use to accomplish their tasks.
Accordingly JLL’s Global Data Center Outlook 2026Through 2030, the data center industry is poised for compound annual growth of 14% and will have nearly 100 gigawatts of new capacity coming online by then. This will effectively double global capacity within five years. The investments required for this amount to around 3 trillion US dollars. The enormous pressure to keep these data centers running efficiently and profitably 24/7 to ensure a return on this huge investment, combined with the complexity of these highly specialized facilities, means that data center managers need tools to meet this increased challenge. Traditional facility management software can’t keep up.
Table of Contents
Time is money
In most commercial real estate contexts, Class A office space is treated as a cost center, an essential but non-revenue-generating expense. In the case of data centers, on the other hand, the system and its infrastructure are the profit center that increases revenue for both owner/operators and tenants. This distinction raises the stakes for the operation. While a late work order can be an inconvenience in an office, in a data center it can become a critical issue with immediate financial impact.
Bob Mostachetti
Courtesy of Planon
Data centers are subject to continuous zero-tolerance availability requirements. Operators must simultaneously manage critical power systems, cooling infrastructure and building systems across multiple sites, with each site having its own asset hierarchies, maintenance histories, regulatory obligations and service level agreement obligations. Using an isolated, poorly integrated computerized management system or an integrated workplace management system in this environment can lead to inefficiency and fragmentation with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Common gaps
When facility teams in data center environments describe their operational vulnerabilities, the same three issues come up again and again:
- Separate systems. A typical operation is to operate a data center infrastructure management platform for infrastructure visibility, a building management system for environmental controls, a power management system for power distribution, and a combination of legacy tools and spreadsheets for maintenance tracking. None of them speak reliably to the others. For example, if an alarm is triggered in the infrastructure monitoring system, a work order will not automatically appear in the maintenance queue. Someone has to make this connection manually, which increases the risk.
- Compliance documentation. As regulatory requirements for data centers increase, the already considerable documentation effort also increases. Facility teams need audit-proof records that show every inspection, maintenance task, and safety procedure was completed, logged, and traceable to the right asset at the right location. Traditional platforms do not typically create this type of documentation automatically.
- Complexity of colocation. Much of the new capacity to be built will serve multiple tenants under varying service level agreements. Managing access controls, SLA reporting, and operational visibility across tenant boundaries requires governance features that most general-purpose platforms do not have.
Talk about infrastructure
For facility experts, this means in practice that your software decisions when building or operating data centers must be considered with the same importance and urgency as the energy and cooling systems.
The facility management system should integrate directly with existing DCIM, BMS and EPMS systems so that alarms automatically generate and route work orders without the need for human translation. Complete maintenance histories and inspection logs must be maintained at the plant level. It should track energy and cooling performance in a format that supports sustainability reporting. And for colocation environments, it must provide the tenant-level visibility that SLA management actually requires.
The data center sector is in the midst of one of the most significant infrastructure expansions in modern history. The facility teams responsible for operating the infrastructure need tools that are actually designed for this task.
https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/the-data-center-boom-is-exposing-the-limits-of-facilities-management-softwa/824519/
