During DataBank’s recent leadership offsite, our executive team took a break from strategic planning to focus on something equally important: Giving back to the Dallas community that’s been home to our headquarters for years.
Through a Build-a-Bike charity event organized by the Leaders Institute, the team assembled six bicycles that were donated to the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Dallas / Cedar Springs—bikes that will give local kids the freedom and joy of riding on two wheels this summer.
The Leaders Institute designed the event around collaboration and problem-solving—skills DataBank’s leaders use every day, but applied in an entirely different context. Teams worked through a series of puzzles and challenges, earning bicycle parts with each completed task. The competitive spirit was high, but so was the sense of purpose.
As parts accumulated, the real work began: assembling six complete bikes from the ground up. What started as boxes of components transformed into fully functional bicycles, ready for their new owners. The hands-on assembly process brought the team together in ways that typical offsite activities rarely do, combining friendly competition with a tangible outcome that would directly impact local kids.
More Than Just Bikes
Representatives from the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Dallas / Cedar Springs joined the team to accept the bikes, and their words made the day’s effort even more meaningful. They explained how these bikes would be used at summer camp, giving kids the chance to experience something many of us take for granted: the independence and excitement of learning to ride.
For many of the children served by the Boys & Girls Club, a bicycle represents more than just transportation or recreation. It’s freedom. It’s confidence. It’s the kind of childhood memory that stays with you for life—the wobbly first attempts, the eventual breakthrough, and the thrill of riding without training wheels for the first time.
These six bikes will give six kids that experience this summer, creating moments of joy and accomplishment that extend far beyond the event itself.
DataBank’s Community Commitment
DataBank’s Dallas headquarters has been part of this community for years, and events like this reflect a commitment that goes beyond business operations. Supporting local organizations like the Boys & Girls Club aligns with DataBank’s belief that strong companies build strong communities—and that giving back isn’t just good corporate citizenship, it’s the right thing to do.
The best team-building experiences create something that lasts beyond the event itself. For DataBank’s leadership team, the May offsite delivered both: stronger collaboration among executives and six bikes that will create lasting memories for kids in Dallas.
As the Boys & Girls Club representatives loaded the bikes and thanked the team, it was clear that everyone involved—from the DataBank leaders who assembled them to the kids who will ride them—gained something valuable from the day.
Complying with any regulation isn’t just about meeting the requirements. It demonstrates how seriously your organization takes cybersecurity. You prove you want to participate in your ecosystem as a responsible stakeholder who values the security of customers, partners, and suppliers. You want to keep everyone’s data safe.
One such example is StateRAMP. To work with state and local governments, solution providers that use a cloud service to process, store, or transmit data, must first meet the StateRAMP cybersecurity standards. This risk and access management program, launched in 2021, comprises service providers offering infrastructure, platform, and software solutions as well as third-party assessment organizations and government officials.
A Commitment to Keeping the Digital Landscape Safe
StateRAMP members commit to making the digital landscape a safer, more secure place for state and local governments and their citizens. The program does this by presenting a common method for verifying the cloud security of vendors that handle government data.
This includes personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), and payment card industry (PCI) information. In addition to protecting data, StateRAMP saves service providers a lot of time: It allows them to verify their security posture once, and then apply that verification to many state and local governments.
Organizations that join StateRAMP also lessen the cybersecurity burden for government agencies. They serve as responsible members in promoting education, best practices, and policy development for cybersecurity across government communities.
DataBank is a member of StateRAMP and adheres to the baseline requirements of NIST SP800-53. The StateRAMP website offers many helpful resources for achieving certification, and in this blog, we present a checklist to help you navigate the requirements and view the journey ahead.
The Key Steps to Achieving StateRAMP Compliance
Start by reviewing the StateRAMP objectives, scope, and compliance levels to confirm your organization falls under the purview of StateRAMP. Then designate a compliance officer on your staff to oversee the compliance process.
The compliance officer can then manage this checklist of tasks as they align with the StateRAMP requirements:
Compare security controls and practices against the requirements to identify coverage gaps.
Prioritize controls and practices to remediate based on the gap analysis—focusing on access control, encryption, incident response, and data protection.
Deploy or adapt security controls and practices to address the gaps.
Document and align security policies, procedures, and protocols with the regulation guidelines.
Educate employees about their roles and responsibilities in maintaining compliance.
Classify data based on sensitivity.
Implement data handling procedures such as encryption, access controls, and data retention policies.
Perform a security assessment and a vulnerability scan to identify and mitigate compliance risks.
Develop an incident response plan with procedures for detecting, responding to, and recovering from security incidents.
Evaluate and manage the security posture of third-party vendors and subcontractors who provide services to state and local government clients.
Maintain audit logs and records of security-related activities—including system changes, user access, and security incidents.
Establish continuous monitoring of security controls and systems to ensure ongoing compliance.
After you work your way through this checklist, engage a certified and independent third party to conduct an assessment of your compliance. Follow this by addressing non-compliance issues identified by the assessment and documenting your remediation efforts.
Pursuing Certification
Once your organization complies with the StateRAMP standards, you can pursue certification through the accreditation process to validate your compliance. After you achieve your initial certification, it then becomes an ongoing process.
This includes educating new hires and refresher education for the entire staff. You also need to perform regular third-party security assessments and vulnerability scans to identify and mitigate compliance risks.
Along the way, try to stay informed of changes to the StateRAMP requirements, guidelines, and best practices so you can adapt your compliance efforts when needed. Other resources to consider include community forums and knowledge-sharing initiatives to exchange insights, best practices, and lessons learned with peers and industry experts.
The Benefits of StateRAMP Compliance
As you conduct regular reviews and evaluations of your compliance program, you will identify areas for improvement. It’s not just about maintaining compliance, it’s also about protecting your data and data belonging to your government customers. StateRAMP provides a solid framework for achieving this objective.
At the same time, by diligently following this checklist, you will bolster your cybersecurity posture and increase the level of trust with your government customers. This in turn enhances your competitiveness in expanding your market opportunities and securing lucrative contracts.
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By Paul Myott, vice president of organizational effectiveness and internal communications at DataBank
Building a strong employee culture in a fast-growing company
The edge carries a double meaning for DataBank. Our 65+ data centers across the U.S. deliver connectivity that brings people close to the digital edge. That’s where they can access low-latency applications.
At the same time, we maintain a strong culture for our people while operating on the edge of a fast-growing company. In the past four years, backed by private equity investors, DataBank acquired four companies and has grown headcount by 400%. One acquisition resulted in our organization more than doubling in size. By the end of this year, we expect to surpass 900 employees.
As you can imagine, along with acquired companies comes new and different people, processes, and technology as well as cultures. All require integration and balancing to ensure we make way for new and different ways of working while also maintaining the strong culture we built along the way.
Define Your True Purpose and Create Culture Cornerstones
We started by promoting the premise that culture directly impacts our brand. How employees feel and act affects the quality of the services we deliver to our customers.
Rather than using the traditional Mission, Vision, and Values statement, we set off to clearly define our Purpose, our Way, and our Impact — not only on customers but also the world. These statements define our organization’s true “north star.” This includes why we exist and the unique way we go about delivering on our purpose.
Purpose Way Impact
Next, we created culture cornerstones to align our purpose with the behavior and character of our people:
Inspire confidence
Put people first
Be data-centered
These ideals guide our behavior every day. They also describe the unique way we deliver on our purpose: To take away the worry of managing mission-critical IT infrastructure.
Understand the Makeup of Your People
Much of what we’ve done — and continue to do — to maintain a healthy and vibrant culture at DataBank requires an understanding of the makeup of our people. If your company is like DataBank, the industry you are in tends to dictate the types, or personas, of the people who naturally gravitate to the type of work you do.
For example, given the highly technical nature of data center work, we have a large population of technologists and system engineers who rely heavily on their technical expertise. Their ability to rigorously solve highly complex digital infrastructure problems is the ideal fit for our business.
We also know — through the use of a culture assessment tool called CultureTalk — we are an organization made up of primarily Hero, Sage, and Everyperson archetypes. The CultureTalk archetypes are characters rooted in centuries of storytelling and Jungian philosophy.
All of this comes together in a unique cultural footprint that has distinct challenges and requires us to tailor our people and culture strategy. Fast-growing companies like ours tend to move quickly, try new approaches, hire new people, and solve problems in the moment. This leaves little time or energy for pragmatic, deep-dive culture initiatives with leaders.
Building a culture “on the edge” is a marathon, not a sprint, that required us to capitalize on small wins and build on them opportunistically. Besides understanding our people and the culture makeup, the path to the culture we have today required the handful of critical steps outlined herein.
Establish Leadership Behaviors
Our mission to build a strong culture then turned to leadership behavior guideposts. We wanted every individual to lead and own the success of the organization by exhibiting these five behaviors:
Embrace and manage change
Collaborate before escalating
Take extreme ownership
Choose trust and respect
Assume positive intent
The DataBank leadership team models these behaviors for their teams and individuals across the company to follow. We also measure these behaviors in an annual culture survey and quarterly employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys — along with monthly culture check-ins with our senior management team. These processes hold our leadership accountable for maintaining a positive culture.
Creating a Common Culture Language
As I mentioned above, the CultureTalk tool has allowed us to create a common language in the organization through 12 character archetypes theorized by the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. We know these archetypes from the characters in stories passed down over hundreds of years — such as the Creator, the Ruler, the Revolutionary, the Jester, and the Lover.
The archetypes create a language to understand people’s behavior and tendencies and why they might act the way they do. It’s a great team-building tool and fosters collaboration while helping people resolve issues. The archetypes also help people understand the different value each person brings to the organization in the way he or she shows up.
Everyone, and therefore every organization, has at least a little of all 12 archetypes in his or her personality. However, two or three tend to be the most dominant. Going through this process, we discovered DataBank predominantly consists of three archetypes:
Our HEROES go above and beyond to win the day and help us succeed collectively.
The SAGE archetypes excel at understanding technology and designing innovative solutions.
EVERYPERSON archetypes promote a one-for-all, all-for-one mentality.
This powerful blend of archetypes across all our teams has created a highly motivated workforce. We also exude a low sense of self-importance, want to win, and feel extreme ownership of technical solutions for our customers.
Creating a Rewards and Recognition Platform
The five leadership behaviors guide our daily interactions, and we recognize them along with other momentous occasions on our culture platform called the DataBank Vault.
The Vault is our online “town square” where our people engage in important company communications. We also facilitate organic peer-to-peer recognition while providing formal monetary awards and other health and welfare activities.
In a highly distributed work environment like ours, the Vault serves as the cultural “glue” that binds us together and reinforces the desired leadership behaviors.
Driving Culture Through Leadership
Building and maintaining a healthy culture is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires a commitment from leaders to invest and engage in your people, and define and uphold the behaviors that align with your organization’s purpose, way, and impact.
Establishing and maintaining a strong culture is not as simple as your CEO bringing everybody into a room, espousing the aspects of your culture, and then just telling them to go off and do it.
In the absence of engaged and committed leadership, a company culture forms and morphs based on collective mindsets and behaviors. It requires strong, engaged leadership at all levels committed to the cause and meeting people where they are. For leaders, the culture also involves working with individuals and small teams: listening, being patient, and inserting yourself where you can add value, then change the trajectory of negative behaviors.
Besides your CEO, culture change requires all levels of your leadership. They should get involved across the organization, working with their teams, and looking for behaviors that could move the culture in unintended directions. They can keep your culture bus heading in the right direction to support your purpose, way, and impact.
Also know that building a successful culture and a healthy workplace takes patience. The leadership team must feel comfortable with not changing things overnight. Sometimes you have to realize you may take two steps forward and one step back. Flexibility and adaptability are key to long-term success.
Bare metal use cases and business benefits of bare metal as a service
Companies today have a wide range of options when it comes to managing vital IT infrastructure, including data, applications, networks, and workloads. Each option must be carefully evaluated to make sure it delivers the best combination of performance, flexibility, cost, location, security, and other important factors.
For many companies, turning to bare metal – delivered as a service in colocation data centers – can be the perfect way to meet these demanding requirements. As a quick overview, bare metal servers are physical, not virtual, but don’t include an operating system or virtualization layer. They are single-tenant machines whose resources are dedicated to just one company.
Bare-metal-as-a-service (BMaaS) is a service model where a provider, like DataBank, preconfigures and deploys in its secure data centers a variety of physical bare metal servers that customers can select, access remotely, and begin using immediately. BMaaS can provide a full stack of capabilities (storage, networking, and computing) with cloud-like deployment and management. When neither cloud nor colocation meets the need, BMaaS can give companies the speed, scalability, and pay-as-you-grow capability of a cloud service but with the freedom, performance, security, and control of a colocation service.
BMaaS offers a Goldilocks solution: It can be the “just right” choice that provides the best of all worlds when it comes to performance, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. The industry is not just noticing, it’s booming: The Bare Metal Cloud Market size is projected to grow from $6.6B in 2023 to more than $34B by 2032 – a 22.8% CAGR. This growth trajectory should instill confidence in your decision to consider BMaaS.
Benefits of Bare Metal in Colocation Data Centers
Bare metal and BMaaS in colocation facilities may be an ideal fit for companies looking to capitalize on the best elements of colocation and cloud hosting. A wide range of employees and potential buyers – titles including chief information officers, chief technology officers, IT engineers, and many more – are interested in capitalizing on bare metal.
Whether they’re looking to reduce their initial capital investment in compute, storage, and networking devices, avoid over- or under-committing to future capacity, or increase scalability (or all the above!), buyers are turning to bare metal for a wide range of benefits:
Performance: Bare metal meets requirements for high-performance applications or workloads by eliminating layers of virtualization. The company’s specific operating system runs directly on the server hardware, successfully reducing overhead that can cause performance issues.
Flexibility: Imagine the case of a CTO who wants to test a particular workload but may have a hard time justifying the cost of purchasing new servers or paying high data egress fees. In this case, the company can add as many bare metal machines as they need in a colocation facility – without ever stepping foot in the data center – giving them a fast, flexible, on-demand resource without the need to reside in another vendor’s environment.
Scalability: Similarly, BMaaS enables companies to quickly scale resources up or down to handle changing demand or traffic patterns. They can also quickly replicate environments on a cloud-like basis, without potential constraints that typically exist with virtualized solutions.
Control: Larger enterprises may have well-established systems and demanding requirements and do not want to fit into someone else’s hosting model. They prefer an industry-standard, closed environment that gives them the ability to develop, test, deploy, and support their workloads, without signing up for extra services they may not need.
Cost: Bare metal servers give companies an extremely flexible billing option. Instead of buying servers – a potentially expensive CapEx investment – companies rent server capacity on an ongoing OpEx model to keep costs low. Additionally, BMaaS engagements offer contracts that are much less complicated than the typical cloud offering.
Edge presence: Many companies look to increase their presence at the edge to minimize latency and better serve their customers. Increasingly, this means high volumes of data need to be sent to the edge, which may not be possible with hyperscalers or could result in high egress fees. Colocation data centers are situated across North America (and the world), giving companies an effective way to accomplish their edge vision and goals.
Deployment time: Bare metal servers provide one other significant benefit: speed to market. In this case, many colocation hosting providers will have proactively planned for scaling the infrastructure and have servers ready to go now, which is a significant advantage in avoiding delays and getting started quickly.
Bare metal offers unparalleled performance, reliability, security, and flexibility, making it ideal for demanding workloads and mission-critical applications. – Datacenters.com
Bare Metal Use Cases
Application and systems development: Development teams can use BMaaS to develop and test new applications, which may require special infrastructure or platforms that may be managed with a traditional cloud service. Developers may also want to avoid being locked into long-term commitments, especially if they anticipate their needs will change for future development projects.
High-Performance Computing (HPC): Companies using deep learning, AI automation, quantum computing, 3D printing, and other examples of advanced computing must process extremely large volumes of data quickly. They may even require the use of graphic process units (GPUs) instead of CPUs to handle workload requirements. BMaaS can tailor the hardware components in a dedicated server to meet the specific needs of an HPC workload.
Low latency/edge computing: Companies in finance, telecom, and content deliver (video streaming) industries all run applications that require low latency and real-time delivery to end users. This often requires strategic placement of data and compute resources – at the edge – to best meet these goals and provide ideal experiences. BMaaS allows these types of companies to replicate and quickly deploy their custom applications on multiple servers closer to their end users.
Dedicated private computing for high security: Also, various legal, government, healthcare and financial entities running applications that require extremely high security embrace BMaaS. Bare metal helps them reduce security threats by eliminating the sharing of hardware resources for operating systems, CPU, memory, storage, and networking.
Game server hosting: BMaaS meets the high-performance, low latency, high availability and flexibility needs of gaming application developers and publishers. Bare metal servers hosted in a high-availability colocation data center provide guaranteed uptime, performance, and scalability needed for delivering a positive gaming experience.
E-commerce website and applications: Single-tenant, dedicated bare metal servers provide the security, performance, and high availability needed for successful e-commerce experiences, and allow infrastructure to be quickly and economically scaled to meet fluctuating demand on a pay-for-use basis.
Big data analytics: Companies managing enormous amounts of data can experience unpredictability and unacceptable performance issues using shared services on public cloud platforms. Bare metal can give them more control and performance while still offering the cost savings and flexibility found with public cloud deployments.
The Bare Metal Advantage
When compared to cloud computing, bare metal may seem to be an outdated approach to compute and infrastructure hosting. Yet bare metal in colocation facilities may be an ideal fit for companies looking to capitalize on the best elements of colocation and cloud hosting.
Many companies are now taking a step back after finding that virtualized cloud platforms may be too restrictive for their needs or more expensive than anticipated. With its ability to deliver fast deployments, reliable performance and scalability, edge solutions, and more, bare metal delivers a best-of-all worlds approach capable of delivering significant business value.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today to learn more about DataBank’s colocation offerings, including bare metal.
Observability provides visibility into network behavior by collecting metrics, logs, and traces to help operators understand and manage system performance.
By Thomas Cannady, vice president, network operations, DataBank
Take advantage of observability in AI-driven networks to achieve better outcomes in the data center
The increased adoption of AI has led to the widespread integration of AI with data center networks — a truly innovative achievement with real business potential. Yet, as companies explore the many possibilities related to AI-driven networks and operations, observability will play a critical role.
What is observability? In the context of networking, observability is different from monitoring. It is the ability to “see,” understand, and analyze the internal state of the network through its outputs. It’s an important consideration since observability can play a critical role in improving the overall efficiency, reliability, and security of AI-powered data center networks.
Potential Challenges Reinforce the Need for Observability
At the heart of AI integration lies the complex interactions between data and algorithms. Data centers process vast amounts of data to fuel AI algorithms and facilitate real-time decision-making. The complexity of modern data center networks – characterized by distributed architectures, diverse workloads and other potential challenges – makes it difficult to maintain visibility and control.
In such a complex, dynamic environment, observability is critical to provide insights into network performance, resource utilization, and any potential anomalies that may arise. Observability can also help companies achieve many significant benefits.
What Are the Benefits of Observability?
One of the primary benefits of observability in AI-driven data center networks is enhanced performance optimization. Using real-time monitoring and analytics, organizations can gain deep visibility into network traffic patterns, workload distribution, and resource allocation.
Armed with this knowledge, network administrators can identify bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization, and proactively address performance issues – before they can flare up into larger challenges. Additionally, by correlating performance metrics with AI-driven predictive analytics, organizations can better anticipate future demands and dynamically adjust network configurations for optimal performance.
Improving Reliability, Resilience, and Security
In addition to performance optimization, observability plays an important role in improving reliability and resilience of data center networks. With AI-powered anomaly detection and predictive maintenance capabilities, companies can detect deviations from normal network behavior in real time, such as unusual traffic patterns or hardware failures. This ability to identify and mitigate potential issues – before they happen – helps minimize downtime, improve fault tolerance, and increase network reliability.
Additionally, by providing complete visibility and insight into the company’s network security defenses, observability enables organizations to detect and respond to security threats more effectively. This is an important advantage to safeguard sensitive data and critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.
Fostering Long-Term Innovation
Beyond these benefits, observability also fosters a culture of innovation and agility within AI-driven data center networks. By facilitating continuous experimentation and optimization, companies can iterate faster, fine-tune AI algorithms and network configurations to achieve better outcomes.
Observability also provides valuable insights into user behavior, application performance, and market trends. This allows companies to make data-driven decisions and quickly adapt to changing business requirements to stay a step ahead. In these examples, observability serves as the foundation for innovation, enabling and driving continuous improvement and creating a new competitive advantage.
Exploring how to achieve effective observability can often to lead to more questions than answers. Clearly it requires a holistic approach that aligns people, process, and technology within the organization. From a technology perspective, companies must invest in advanced monitoring tools, telemetry solutions, and AI-powered analytics platforms capable of capturing, analyzing, and visualizing vast amounts of network data in real time.
Companies also should embrace a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. This is an important element to foster cross-functional team, including network engineers, data scientists, AI specialists, and many others to drive innovation and solve complex challenges collaboratively.
Prioritize Observability for a New Competitive Edge
Observability serves as a critical linchpin in the convergence of AI and data center networks and provides valuable insights into performance, reliability, and security. By harnessing the power of observability, companies can unlock the full potential of AI-driven operations to drive efficiency, agility, and innovation in today’s digital age. Prioritizing observability as a strategic goal will help leading organizations navigate the complexities of AI-powered data center networks
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Last week, on May 9, 2024, DataBank was joined by its customers, construction partners, elected officials, and the media, to celebrate the dedication of its new data center campus in Orangeburg New York.
Watch the video
The 34-acre Orangeburg Campus will ultimately feature two data centers providing up to 200,000 sq. feet of data center capacity 40MW of critical IT power. The first facility on the campus – LGA3 – is already under construction and expected to begin operating in later 2024 or early 2025.
Accommodating HPC
Built to accommodate the most demanding, high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, most of LGA3’s capacity has been leased to a prominent cloud computing customer. LGA3, and the future LGA4, represent the cornerstone of IT infrastructure in New York’s Hudson Valley aligning with endeavors to establish New York as the national leader in technology research and innovation.
Celebration Recognized by Customers, Partners, Local Government, Press
To celebrate the dedication, DataBank’s CEO Raul Martynek was joined by four dignitaries, all of whom left their handprints in cement to make the campus’ status as a foundation IT infrastructure in NY state. They included Brandon Lloyd, Governor Hochul’s Representative from the Lower Hudson Valley; Bill Weber, NY State Senator from the 38th District; Lucy Redzeposki, Rockland County Director of Economic Development & Tourism; and Teresa Kenny, Orangeburg NY Town Supervisor.
