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The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged businesses and government facilities in unique ways. Many have to operate under conditions where employees are working off premises. Others have had to limit their on-site staff in order to follow social distancing requirements. Many commercial buildings sit empty, while essential businesses like utility plants must remain operational. It has become more important than ever to monitor these workplaces around the clock to mitigate threats to facilities, equipment and inventory.

If critical vaccines and other pharmaceuticals are stored at an unsafe temperature for too long, they can lose their potency. For patients with chronic illnesses, taking a damaged dosage can be life-threatening. But even common medicines can break down and have harmful effects, and it can be difficult to tell the difference between a compromised product and a safe one. That's why pharmaceutical and vaccine providers must take appropriate measures to ensure all pharmaceutical products are stored at the correct temperature.

Medical tissue samples, critical vaccines, pharmaceutical products and other frozen or refrigerated inventory can be ruined if the exact temperature is not maintained while in storage. Or they can fall out of compliance if their temperature is regulated. In addition, several regulating bodies provide temperature standards, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program, and state and local health departments. Storing cold pharmaceutical products presents additional challenges.

If you work at a zoo, wildlife preserve, or animal research center, you know how important continuous monitoring of environmental conditions is to ensuring animal safety. This is equally important for pet care facilities, as you can read about in a separate blog post. It isn’t easy to maintain an ideal living environment for animals from all over the world. Living areas need to be kept to exact standards to ensure that animals remain safe and comfortable.

Proper storage of pharmaceuticals from research and development through dispensing is crucial to ensure that the products remain safe and effective. Temperature and humidity can have drastic effects on drugs and their ingredients. If stored at the wrong temperatures for even a short period of time, they can become ineffective, lose potency or even become harmful to patients.

Data center outages can last anywhere from seconds to hours. But regardless of the length of time a system is down, unexpected downtime can cost you revenue, customers and brand loyalty. This is why it’s critical to ensure continuous monitoring against common culprits for data center downtime. Even if you have a DCIM, it is ideal to have a redundant system that can provide immediate notification of alarms from your UPS, PDU, and other critical equipment. 

Here are some of the top causes of data center downtime and strategies for how you can prevent them from happening in your data center.

Remote monitoring is critical to your operations. Without a reliable monitoring solution, you have no way of knowing when issues occur after hours unless you have personnel at the facility 24/7. Even then, you run the risk of overlooking equipment issues or status changes that cannot be detected without the appropriate sensors and monitoring system installed.

Improving efficiency is a top priority for data center managers. In today’s data-driven world, server rooms and data centers play a critical role in keeping businesses up and running. According to Gartner, the average cost of data center downtime is $5,600 per minute. That’s why data centers need to have systems in place to ensure continuous monitoring of equipment status and environmental conditions.