What is a data centre?

A data centre is a building dedicated to providing IT server operations either to an organisation (enterprise data centre) or to external clients (colocation data centre). The data centre provides a secure, managed and controlled environment for IT operations including resilience and uptime through the provision of critical infrastructure systems (critical power, cooling and fire suppression), access control and environmental monitoring for temperature, humidity and water leakage. A data centre can have one or more server rooms or data halls within its building. In a colocation data centre, these may be rented out, in whole or in part, to specific clients who want to run their servers and computing network needs off-site to their principle place of work. Data backup, disaster recovery, webhosting and cloud-based software applications are common examples of services provided by a colocation data centre.