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RIYADH, KSA – March 8, 2024  – Uptime Institute today announced the launch of the Uptime Institute Data Center Academy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in collaboration with the Tuwaiq Academy and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. The academy will train hundreds of individuals each year, supporting the Kingdom’s ambition to employ over five thousand new digital talents in commercial data centers within the next six years.

The Uptime Institute Data Center Academy aims to build and strengthen a sustainable ecosystem for the development of knowledge and skills in the digital infrastructure field in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The academy will provide candidates with comprehensive training, including formal and on-the-job training, continuous assessment, and support, educating them with the skills and expertise needed to start lucrative careers in the thriving digital infrastructure industry, encompassing the data center and network cabling sectors.

The initiative will contribute to enhancing the job market in the data center and related ICT sectors, building a robust national talent pool that supports the Saudi Vision 2030 Digital Transformation Agenda.

“This partnership aligns with Saudi Vision 2030 and the commitment of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to empower Saudi youth with the skills needed to thrive in the digital economy,” said Ibrahim Al-Nasser, Deputy Minister for Future Jobs and Capabilities at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Mustapha Louni, Chief Business Officer of Uptime Institute, expressed pride in being part of Saudi Vision 2030 to build a successful digital society and contribute to accelerating the digital transformation process. The academy, in collaboration with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and Tuwaiq Academy, aims to bridge the talent gap and support the expected growth in data center capacity. The integrated learning journey provided by the academy is designed to catalyze key sectors of the future economy.

Abdulaziz Alhammadi, CEO of Tuwaiq Academy, emphasized Tuwaiq Academy's role in empowering specialists with essential skills in the labor market, particularly in the field of data science. The academy aims to develop specialized Saudi capabilities in emerging technologies to meet the demands of the job market.

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority, and the author and exclusive certifier of the Tier Standards, which have been used in the design, construction, and operations of thousands of data center sites in more than 114 countries. Over ninety thousand digital infrastructure professionals from countries around the world have looked to Uptime Institute’s education programs to help them grow their business and advance their careers. The Uptime Institute Data Center Academy is actively engaging with local colleges and universities in the Kingdom to raise industry awareness and support among young Saudis and provide access to globally respected digital infrastructure education programs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. With over 3,400 awards issued in over 114 countries around the globe, and over 1,000 currently active projects in 80+ countries, Uptime has helped thousands of companies optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

For over 30 years, the company has established industry-leading benchmarks for data center performance, resilience, sustainability, and efficiency, which provide customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform across a wide array of operating conditions at a level consistent with their individual business needs. Uptime’s Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the design, construction, and operation of data centers. Offerings include the organization’s Tier Standard and Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, and awards, SCIRA-FSI financial sector risk assessment, and a broad range of additional risk management, as well as performance, availability, and sustainability offerings. Uptime Education accredited training courses have been successfully completed by over 10,000 data center professionals and have now been expanded by the acquisition of CNet Training, Ltd. which has also trained over 80,000 digital infrastructure professionals.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with main offices in London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Riyadh, Singapore, and Taipei. For more information, please visit uptimeinstitute.com.

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Increasing demand and the need for more capacity requires infrastructure changes and new technology deployment, while stricter regulations and the need for additional skilled staff must be addressed

NEW YORK, NY – July 18, 2023  – Uptime Institute, today announced the release of its 13^th Annual Global Data Center survey. The findings show data center operators facing stricter regulations and more pressure to reduce energy, along with persistent staffing and supply chain issues. The Report shows new technologies potentially presenting a promising way forward, but these often are found lacking in standardization and scalability. While for many organizations, investments in efficiency and resiliency are beginning to pay off, progress has been gradual.

“Our data shows operators grappling with several issues,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director, Uptime Intelligence. “In 2023, the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have receded, but other challenges have emerged. Digital infrastructure managers are now most concerned with improving energy performance and dealing with staffing shortfalls, while Government regulations aimed at improving data center sustainability and visibility are beginning to require attention, investment, and action.”

Uptime’s Annual Global Data Center survey is the largest, most comprehensive, and longest-running study in the digital infrastructure sector. It provides detailed insights into the digital infrastructure landscape and a view into its future trajectory. Key findings from the 2023 report include:

• Average global power usage effectiveness (PUE) levels have remained flat for four years. Additional improvements in PUE levels will require significant investment.
• As more organizations opt for a hybrid approach to IT, the share of enterprise workloads that are run in corporate, on-premises facilities has fallen to below half for the first time and is expected to shrink further.
• Enterprise operators say data security is the biggest impediment to moving mission-critical workloads to the public cloud. Resiliency and transparency are lesser concerns.
• Server rack densities are climbing steadily, but slowly. Average rack densities are below 6 kilowatt (kW) per rack; most operators do not have any racks beyond 20 kW. This suggests the widespread use of direct liquid cooling is not imminent.
• Many operators only collect a limited amount of sustainability related data and will struggle to meet emerging sustainability reporting requirements, or in turn, the requirements of some customers and the public.
• Most operators believe acceptance of the use of artificial intelligence will grow in data centers, but operators are distrustful of its ability to make reliable operational decisions.

Outages:

• More than half (55%) of operators reported they have had an outage at their site in the past three years, the lowest number yet recorded. This continues a trend of steady improvement.
• Power outages continue to be cited as the single biggest cause of outages.

Staffing:

• Uptime Intelligence data shows that approximately 8% of the data center workforce are women. In the US (if not all countries), this rate is below that of other male-dominated industries, such as mining and construction.
• Nearly two-thirds of operators have problems recruiting or retaining staff – however, this figure is not currently growing. The largest skill gaps are in operations, mechanical and electrical roles.

About the Survey:

Uptime conducted this year’s annual Global Data Center Survey online from February – April 2023 and collected responses from more than 850 data center owners and operators and nearly 700 vendors and consultants.

Learn More:

Uptime’s 2023 Global Data Center Survey also includes findings on regulatory support, sustainability, and metrics, staffing shortfalls, skills gaps, diversity, innovation and impact, and more. Download the executive summary report here and register for the webinar covering its key trends and takeaways on July 18th at 12:00 PM EDT, 5:00 PM BST.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. For over 25 years, the company has established industry-leading benchmarks for data center performance, resilience, sustainability, and efficiency, which provide customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform across a wide array of operating conditions at a level consistent with their business needs. Uptime’s Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the design, construction, and operation of data centers. With its Tier Standard and Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, SCIRA-FSI financial sector risk assessment, broad range of additional risk and performance assessments, intelligence research service, and training courses completed by over 10,000 data center professionals, Uptime has helped thousands of companies in over 114 countries to optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Riyadh, Singapore, and Taipei. For more information, please visit www.uptimeinstitute.com.

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Newly created role will further accelerate global organizational growth and momentum.

NEW YORK, NY – December 20, 2023  – Uptime Institute, is pleased to announce the appointment of Mustapha Louni to the position of Chief Business Officer, a role specifically created to drive strategic leadership and client success. In this new role, Mr. Louni will assume responsibility for the global Uptime sales and marketing organizations and drive overall business value for all Uptime clients. He will retain his existing responsibilities overseeing operations in the Middle East, India, Africa, and the Asia Pacific regions. In this elevated capacity, Mr. Louni is poised to play a pivotal role in driving Uptime's next phase of global expansion through strategic initiatives to enhance market awareness of the dramatically expanding global service lines and delivery capabilities of Uptime that uniquely support the global data center industry in its pursuit of ever higher performance through elevated availability, resiliency, sustainability, and cyber-security of digital infrastructure. Louni's appointment renews and expands Uptime Institute's 30-year commitment to advancing excellence in the data center sector on a global scale.

“Today we are experiencing the next phase of the one-time, planetary transformation from analog to digital. This unprecedented, once-in-a-generation growth in data center demand is primarily driven by continuing cloud adoption, the new promise of AI, and the demonstrable fact that hybrid digital infrastructure is here to stay for the foreseeable future,” said Martin McCarthy, CEO, Uptime Institute. “These complex and nuanced market demands require a visionary talent like Mustapha Louni. He is someone who can not only deftly manage specific aspects of the business but also remain ahead of accelerating changes and trends. He continues to earn client trust and respect by timely delivery on demanding commitments while he also inspires and energizes colleagues and clients alike. I am delighted to announce Mr. Louni’s new position and know that he will continue to expand the impact that he has already brought to Uptime since his arrival.”

In 2014, Mr. Louni joined the Uptime organization in the United Arab Emirates, leveraging his extensive experience from roles at Panduit and Schneider Electric in Paris and Dubai. As the company’s first commercial resource in the Middle East & Africa region, Mr. Louni played a pivotal role in expanding Uptime’s presence. Within a year, he successfully established what became and remains Uptime’s fastest growing regional office. Under his leadership, Uptime has extended his impressive trajectory of growth in MEA to the Asia-Pacific regions, augmenting the Uptime workforce with dedicated team members spanning more than a dozen countries across these regions. A new Uptime office has been inaugurated in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) this year, further fortifying the company’s ability to meet its commitment to sustained growth and excellence and serve clients in critical, accelerating markets for digital infrastructure.

Uptime Institute began development of its proprietary and now globally recognized Tier Standards and its Tier Certifications 30 years ago to ensure that the mission critical computing needs of all organizations could be met with confidence and understood by executive management. Since that time, Uptime Tier Certification as well as other Uptime offerings including assessments and awards in digital infrastructure for ensuring business performance in areas of management and operations, risk and resilience, sustainability, and more recently cyber-security have gained global adoption. Uptime’s expanding success is based on delivering a unique business service that is based upon unparalleled engineering excellence and technical mastery, while remaining vendor independent and technology agnostic.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. With over 3,400 awards issued in over 114 countries around the globe, and over 1,000 currently active projects in 80+ countries, Uptime has helped thousands of companies optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

For over 30 years, the company has established industry-leading benchmarks for data center performance, resilience, sustainability, and efficiency, which provide customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform across a wide array of operating conditions at a level consistent with their individual business needs. Uptime’s Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the design, construction, and operation of data centers. Offerings include the organization’s Tier Standard and Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, and awards, SCIRA-FSI financial sector risk assessment, and a broad range of additional risk management, as well as performance, availability, and sustainability offerings. Uptime Education accredited training courses have been successfully completed by over 10,000 data center professionals and have now been expanded by the acquisition of CNet Training, Ltd. which has also trained over 80,000 digital infrastructure professionals.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with main offices in London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Riyadh, Singapore, and Taipei. For more information, please visit uptimeinstitute.com.

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NEW YORK, NY – February 14, 2023  – Uptime Institute, the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority, a Dominus Capital, L.P. portfolio company, announced today that it has completed its acquisition of LEET Security S.L.. LEET Security provides an independent cyber security risk evaluation methodology and rating system that has been designed to specifically identify, characterize, and rate cyber security risk within any services utilizing digital infrastructure for any aspect of service delivery.

All organizations and their ICT service partners are under increasing pressure to secure their digital infrastructure in response to the complex and ever-evolving cyber-risk threat landscape. The LEET Cyber Security rating system directly addresses the issue by giving clients the ability to easily understand the nature and severity of these risks. The clients can then take the appropriate steps to mitigate these risks and improve their organization’s security posture on a continuous basis therefore hardening their organization against cyber threats. This includes identifying systemic weaknesses and specific exposures and then building compensating security controls across both the internal and external “attack surface” that may exist in any digital services they use, whether this service is provisioned in-house or delivered via a third-party service provider.

LEET’s Cyber Security service offers a rigorous and transparent approach built on a comprehensive framework of controls derived from the most widely, globally adopted cyber standards and frameworks including National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), International Standards Organization (ISO-27001) & Esquema Nacional de Seguridad/National Security Framework (ENS) among others. LEET’s proven and constantly evolving rating system provides customers and internal users confidence that the LEET rated digital services that they rely upon are assessed and monitored on a continuous basis.

“LEET Security has built a unique and differentiated solution that meets a critical need that all organizations have – the ability to thoroughly detect, investigate and mitigate cyber security threats,” said Martin V. McCarthy, chief executive officer, Uptime Institute. “Traditional risk management methodologies take an outside-in approach or inside-out approach, which doesn’t always account for how ‘bad actors’ might exploit potential attack surfaces. LEET Security delivers both perspectives across the entire landscape of an organization’s external and internal cyber security vulnerabilities to provide deep visibility and insight into the exposed threat surfaces and allows that organization to improve their cyber security posture. The addition of LEET’s cyber ratings service offering to Uptime Institute’s portfolio of services will provide unparalleled value to customers by building upon the physical and operational security elements already covered by Uptime in our various assessments and certifications,” continued McCarthy.

“We are excited to be able to join Uptime Institute, the undisputed Global Digital Infrastructure Authority,” said Antonio Ramos, chief executive officer and founder LEET Security. “Over the past decade, LEET Security, S.L. has developed a unique and comprehensive cyber security rating system. We will now have many more opportunities for growth through geographic expansion and development of new service offerings as part of Uptime. We look forward to this next phase of globalization of our firm. I want to personally thank all our clients, staff, and investors who have supported us over this journey since 2010, in our delivery of unique value and in bringing ongoing innovation to the critical area of cyber security.”

"The LEET Security acquisition builds on Uptime’s leadership position in the worldwide digital infrastructure market. LEET enhances the core value delivered by Uptime’s existing offerings by incorporating a differentiated cyber security service in response to customer and market demands. We are excited about the scale of opportunities ahead for both companies," said Bob Haswell, founding partner, Dominus Capital.

LEET Security represents Uptime’s second M&A transaction completed this month. It follows two weeks after Uptime’s acquisition of CNet Training, LTD, a 50+ person global firm, headquartered in the UK that is the leader in digital infrastructure education and learning & development solutions. Uptime continues to identify and assess potential add-on acquisitions to broaden its service portfolio, and to more completely execute on its mission to help all datacenter owners, operators, and tenants around the world provide and access the resilient, available, sustainable, and secure digital infrastructure required for their mission critical business applications and services.

About Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute is the Global Digital Infrastructure Authority. For over 25 years, the company has established industry-leading benchmarks for data center performance, resilience, sustainability, and efficiency, which provide customers assurance that their digital infrastructure can perform across a wide array of operating conditions at a level consistent with their business needs. Uptime’s Tier Standard is the IT industry’s most trusted and adopted global standard for the design, construction, and operation of data centers – the backbone of the digital economy. Its Tier Standard and Certifications, Management & Operations reviews, Standardized, Comprehensive Risk Assessment-FSI financial sector risk assessment, broad range of additional risk and performance assessments, Intelligence research services, and accredited training courses completed by over 100,000 data center professionals, have helped thousands of companies in over 100 countries to optimize critical IT assets while managing costs, resources, and efficiency.

Uptime Institute is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in London, Sao Paulo, Dubai, KSA, Singapore, and Taipei and now Madrid. For more information, please visit www.uptimeinstitute.com.

About LEET Security

LEET Security is an independent rating agency, set up for the sole purpose of developing and managing a labelling system to reliably rate the information security posture of organizations and their third-party ICT service providers/partners.

Since its inception in 2010, the LEET Security cyber rating agency compiled and updates the risk and control measures defined in the main international regulations, standards, and best practices including National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) & International Standards Organization (ISO-27001) & Esquema Nacional de Seguridad/ National Security Framework (ENS) among others. Using its proprietary and tested methodology LEET classifies and groups the defined controls to provide a security posture ‘score’ which is attested by the LEET Stamp with a detailed report.

The LEET Security rating provides confidence to customers and users that cyber security risks are identified and characterized within any services utilizing digital infrastructure for any aspect of service delivery across enterprise-owned digital services and infrastructure and third-party partners. The rating clearly indicates an organization’s commitment and investment into measuring, monitoring, and hardening their security posture, providing full transparency to the security measures implemented. For more information, please visit www.leetsecurity.com.

About Dominus Capital, L.P.

Based in New York, Dominus Capital is a leading middle-market private equity investment firm focused on management-led buyouts and growth capital investments in family-owned and founder-operated companies in the business services and light manufacturing sectors. Drawing on the experience, knowledge and network of its founders and a team of in-house operating executives, Dominus works hand-in-hand with exceptional management teams to unlock the untapped potential of its portfolio companies. Recently named one of the top 50 middle market private equity firms, Dominus takes a long-term approach to investing and has a consistent and highly successful track record of achieving significant growth at its portfolio companies. The Dominus team has executed more than 90 transactions over the past 20+ years. For more information, please visit www.dominuscap.com.

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