To Be or Not to Be…Comments on Data Center Certification Part 3

Usually when I teach project management courses in university classrooms, when we discuss the topic of quality, I usually resort to a resource, which is to use a video I found on YouTube, about the cost of quality, I am sure the curious reader has already searched for it or already seen it on the net, this video describes three very serious accidents that humanity has gone through because those who made the decisions wanted to “save”, leaving aside actions related to quality control, situations that occurred at NASA, Toyota and in the United States, causing in some cases very high personal and material losses.

Those of us who work in technology must never lose sight of the ultimate purpose of the code we develop, the server we configure, the cables we connect, the UPS we install. The purpose of technology infrastructure is to provide a service to society and to the people who look to “the system” to help them when they need it most.

A data center is the central part of this technological ecosystem, so ensuring its proper operation and covering any contingency scenario is vital for an organization that owes its customers.

It is true that in my professional career I have met several people from different organizational levels who do not have the same vision, I remember when in a company we carried out local network implementation projects, there were customers who wanted us not to certify their cabling, that continuity testing would be enough, I remember that a biased vision of the value for the organization, failed to assume the cost of quality that experience and best practices recommend, since prevention is better than regretting later rework or losses as in the case of the video I mentioned above.

The certification process, performed by a third party, will allow to detect hidden flaws in the design or implementation, in addition to testing and verifying the functionality of the equipment and systems of a data center, each company should make the best effort to choose how and where to perform this process, but it is the only way to validate that your company’s data center meets the requirements with which it was designed and built.