The role and impact of Data Centres on developing new Corporate Real Estate Strategies for resilient business

Enhancing our cities adaptive capacity to react to adverse conditions, generated by climate, environmental, resource or community driven vulnerabilities, is part of a global new approach to strengthening our living and working environment. The creation of a resilient business environment plays a key role in the competition between modern day global cities. Various rankings of resilient global cities list technology innovation, digitalization and access to data as crucial factors in achieving a success status. The development of Data Centres (DCs) forms a growing sector as part of new strategies for global business. Safe data storage and management have been identified as a key business strategy components for banking, finance, retail, TNT and global service companies alike. Precise design requirements and challenging location constraints for developing such DCs are better tackled as part of a Corporate Real Estate Strategy (CRES) aligned to each global company’s business needs. At the same time technological advances and the constraints for local property markets generated by the development of DCs in overcrowded urban centres require more research on future implications. What is the role and impact of Data Centres on developing new Corporate Real Estate Strategies in line with resilient business requirements? How can decision-making factors for developing new DCs be included in the management of global companies’ property portfolios? The proposed research is two-fold. First a case study approach will be used to analyse the role and impact of DCs on the alignment of new resilient business strategy requirements with CRES for global companies. Second, future implications of DCs becoming a core component of global companies’ portfolios will be assessed in order to establish requirements for a more resilient CRES approach.