Month: April 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a bright light on the importance of all sorts of jobs and made us all acutely aware of how important medical workers, teachers, store clerks, farmers, and truck drivers are to the continuity of our everyday lives. Well, the data center industry has its own set of unsung heroes – those who support the infrastructure needed to keep us connected as we shift almost exclusively to working, learning, and playing online.

DataBank has been designated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – as a “National Critical Function” (NCF). The NCF is a function of “government and the private sector so vital to the United States that their disruption, corruption, or dysfunction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”

Our essential employees know this and have been briefed on our Continuity of Operations Plans (CoOP) from their first date of hire. Few could have imagined the current scenario, but all have responded as heroes, facing the obvious risks to come to work, keep our facilities open and clean, and keep our customer infrastructures up and running.

This is the first installment of a series of blog posts we’re making to highlight these amazing, hardworking members of the DataBank team who, while taking the utmost precautions, are working tirelessly and fearlessly to keep us all connected.

Nic Forcum, Lead Data Center Technician, Kansas City 

Nic works closely with customers and vendors on the Operations side of our Kansas City facilities. He assists in providing access to equipment, turning up circuits, and performing remote hands services, including the rack and stack of equipment, Layer 1 troubleshooting, and internal networking.

You can imagine his days are already very busy, but amidst the COVID-19 crisis, his responsibilities and duties expanded and have included additional remote hands requests, turning up more circuits so customers can have increased bandwidth, along with other support tasks to assist clients who are staying home and working remotely.

As Nic so aptly puts it: “We are a 24x7x365 operation here, so have always had staff on-site around the clock. As of late, I have seen everyone going the extra mile to support each other and ensuring our clients are taken care of. We work as a team. I didn’t realize how often I shook hands with people until this happened and it can’t be done anymore. This crisis has shown us there will be a new way of doing business moving forward utilizing internet, cloud, and managed services such as IaaS. Client satisfaction during this time is very important to us. During this crisis, DataBank has been very supportive of its data center staff. I am proud to be a ‘DataBanker’.”

Thanks, Nic! We appreciate your dedication and customer-focused spirit. And we’re fortunate to have you on our team.

Brandon Heslop, Lead Data Center Supervisor, Salt Lake City

Brandon Heslop is another one of DataBank’s heroes of this pandemic. He is currently working to finalize the details for the SLC5 opening. That includes facilitating delivery of last-minute items like appliances and furniture. He is also a crucial point-person for access to facilities.

“We’ve seen an uptick in cross connect requests across our data centers. Our customers may want to connect to a carrier for added service, for example. Everyone is experiencing higher levels of bandwidth usage. We are running two to three new cross connects a week per site, with customers wanting them expedited as quickly as possible,” says Brandon.

When asked how he’s able to keep things up and running, Brandon immediately commends his team for being on the “front lines” day in and day out to keep operations running smoothly and ensuring business continuity for DataBank. Brandon says he misses the day-to-day small talk and face-to-face camaraderie at the data center. He says he feels communication will improve as an outcome of the current crisis. “Everyone is realizing how important those little, personal interactions are.”

Brandon, thank you for your commitment to the DataBank team and our customers! We couldn’t do it without you!

In the days, weeks and months ahead, we will be highlighting more of DataBank’s essential staff, so that you can put faces to those who are behind the scenes – indeed behind the SCREENS – of your devices and keeping you online, every day.

To our end-users, we want to remind you that the essential employees at DataBank’s data centers across the country are making sure you stay connected and your IT infrastructure is secure. And we thank them and recognize them for their work.

For our customers, we recognize that COVID-19 represents an unprecedented challenge, and we’re here to help. We know you have more to worry about now than ever before, and that’s why we’re providing the people and the expertise you need to reduce the burden of managing your IT infrastructure. Thank you for choosing DataBank.

Any company that grows through acquisition needs to be as thoughtful and thorough in its approach to integrating newly acquired people as it is in integrating systems, products and financials. It’s often the piece that makes an acquisition truly successful, particularly in our line of business, where we’re responsible for managing our customers’ mission-critical assets. During our recent growth, DataBank leadership has been keenly focused on the “people” aspect and purposefully set out to ensure that all team members across all of the acquired companies had an opportunity to help shape and embrace a culture we could all be proud of.

“Paying close attention to our culture and purpose is a big part of why we’re performing so well while so many other firms struggle to make M&A work,” says DataBank CEO Raul Martynek “A strong culture inspires and energizes people, creating a more cohesive team with a unified purpose: to continually serve our customers better.”

Martynek outlined the principles – call them “musts” – upon which the DataBank culture is built:

• Be Authentic: Our culture must reflect who we really are and incorporate the best aspects of each organization we’ve brought into the DataBank family.
• Be Aligned: Our culture (internal) must align with our brand (external) and its promise of “Evolving the Data Center Experience.”
• Be Articulated: Our culture must be expressed in simple, memorable messages that resonate with our team members.
• Be Actionable: Our culture must be backed by behaviors that deliver a world-class experience for our customers.
• Be Affirmed: Our culture must be measurable so we can make sure we were living it and staying true to it.

Uncovering Our Characteristic Behaviors

To ensure our culture is authentic to who we truly are, we designed a year-long process that touched every employee company-wide. This included group workshops and one-on-one interviews at every level of the organization and across our locations to gain an accurate picture of how team members really experienced – and felt about – the company’s day-to-day culture. As part of that process, we utilized a survey instrument called CultureTalk™ that was designed specifically to measure the “character” of the culture in each of our locations. Rooted in the famous psychologist Carl Jung’s notion of storytelling “archetypes” (e.g., the Hero, the Caregiver, the Sage, the Outlaw, etc.), the CultureTalk platform provided an amazing snapshot of our behavioral “inventory” that allowed us to find the common behaviors that can drive a shared sense of purpose.

Aiming for Brand and Culture Alignment

To take the next step of aligning our brand and culture, we compared the CultureTalk survey output with the findings from two earlier exercises: a half-day internal brand workshop and a series of subsequent customer interviews. This helped ensure that the language we used and the narratives we developed would be powerfully resonant with both employees and customers. The CultureTalk data was particularly helpful here, as each archetype has a unique narrative quality that allowed us to craft a story that knit the brand and culture closer together.

Articulating Our Purpose

As we sought to clearly and simply articulate the tenets of our brand and culture, we turned to a new messaging framework called “Purpose-Way-Impact” or PWI – a contemporary alternative to the stale old “Mission, Vision and Values” framework that’s typically neither inspiring nor memorable. Based on the metaphor of a three-stage rocket, PWI cuts through the jargon to yield tight, memorable, and compelling statements of “why we’re here,” “how we operate,” and “what it means for the world.” The three statements were developed in a facilitated workshop where senior leadership team members joined together to express our highest ideals in a manner that rallies both internal and external audiences.

Defining the Actions Necessary for Delivering a World-Class Experience

To make sure all of the above principles and messages were actionable within the organization, we defined a set of four key behaviors that leaders can model… and employees can emulate. Developed in a workshop with the entire leadership team, these behaviors –

and

are two examples – were designed to maximize communication and interactions across all acquired teams and locations to bring all DataBank team members together as one cohesive operating unit.

Finally, to ensure that all of this work is positively affirmed, we’ve developed a quarterly company-wide survey to measure the overall health of our culture and our adherence to the four key behaviors. This will allow us to determine whether we’re staying true to our ideals, where we’re getting better, and where we need improvement. Survey results will be unpacked in detail in quarterly leadership meetings and shared with the entire company so everyone can see how we’re doing.

The Keystone to Our Continued Success

At this point, it should be clear to all that we’ve invested heavily in truly understanding ourselves and defining the essential messages and behaviors that make DataBank an ideal partner for taking the worry out of managing mission-critical IT infrastructures. This is both our purpose on this planet and a goal against which we must continually make measurable progress.

According to Martynek, “If you ask me to identify the one single thing that is most critical to our success, my answer would be our corporate culture. It has the power to unify our team, drive our business, and set us apart in a sea of ‘vanilla’ data centers.” He adds, “It’s the cornerstone of our aspirations to truly be the ‘Data Center Evolved.’ And as we continue to grow through organic growth and M&A, our strong culture will be a key advantage in ensuring that we never lose sight of our purpose to support our customer’s mission critical data center requirements.”