Data centers are the keystone of our increasingly digitalized world. They are the lynchpin for businesses too, housing all the crucial data they rely on.
Where you keep all your data is an important decision. Your data needs to be held securely and in a cost-effective way, and the center you choose should be a long-term investment that you can rely on for years to come.
For lots of businesses, including tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon, the Nordics are a safe bet. Here’s why choosing locations in the Nordics like Sweden and Iceland is a wise choice.
Data centers hold huge amounts of sensitive information and so need to be in secure locations that are unlikely to be compromised by political unrest or natural disasters – just like the Nordics.
These countries enjoy relative political stability, benefit from a stable economy, and have a wealth of skilled workers and resilient supply chains. One of the reasons why atNorth is opening a new data center in Sweden is because the country ranks number seven on the Global Resilience Index, giving the business and its clients confidence that the data that resides in the atNorth datacenters will be secure for years to come.
The Nordics are streets ahead on sustainability. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland all rank in the top 20 of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which grades 180 countries around the world. In fact, Sweden is number eight. The Nordics’ high scores are owed, in part, to their use of renewable energy sources. It is estimated that 40% of gross domestic energy consumption in the Nordics is from renewable resources.
Nordic countries have the infrastructure in place to continue powering data centers through the global energy transition. Not only that, choosing a data center in a Nordic country could help you cut down Scope 3 emissions – those produced in your supply chain that are the most difficult to reduce.
Thanks to their use of renewable energy sources, the Nordics benefit from improved cost stability compared to countries that rely heavily on nuclear power and fossil fuels. The price of renewable energy won’t be affected by regulatory changes related to carbon, which could include tax hikes.
Nordic countries can also run more cost-effective data centers because of the colder air temperature. As much as 45% of a typical data center’s energy consumption comes from the cooling systems needed to cool down hardware. But in Iceland and Sweden, where atNorth’s data centers are based, the naturally colder air does part of the job normally done by those cooling systems.
The Nordics are well connected to countries around the world; Sweden alone is directly linked to Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Germany and more. That’s not all. Sweden is also ranked number three in the world for internet speeds, boasting an average download speed of 55.18 Mbps.
Iceland, the home of atNorth’s existing data centers, serves FLAPD markets in under 40 milliseconds, sometimes in as little as 19 milliseconds. This is set to get even faster. A seabed cable operator in Iceland has announced a new installation of another high-speed sea cable, which will connect Iceland with Ireland and drive down the latency to 10 to 15 milliseconds. This will continue to improve connectivity to both the UK and US.
Building on the success of the company’s data centers in Iceland, atNorth is excited to be opening a new data center in Stockholm soon, which will see its total capacity reach 100MW. Get in touch to find out how atNorth can support your business.