INDUSTRY INSIGHT Closing the maintenance maturity gap


As the data centre boom shows no signs of slowing down, the need for facilities to adopt infrastructure-grade asset management has never been greater. Alice Oakes, service and support manager at Wilo, highlights the growing opportunity to shift from reactive and preventative approaches to meet mounting expectations around resilience, efficiency and sustainability


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ata centres are tasked with demonstrating leading standards of efficiency and sustainability. Behind this performance sits a complex ecosystem of assets, from


white-space technologies such as servers, GPUs and storage systems to grey-space infrastructure including cooling and water management. To maintain uptime rates north of 99.999% - the gold standard across the industry – all components must work together seamlessly. It’s no secret the sector is operating under


pressure. New facilities face long development and grid connection timelines, while demand for capacity continues to accelerate, leaving much of the burden with older data centres. At the same time, operators, many of which


are already battling staff and skills shortages, face growing scrutiny around energy and water performance, with metrics such as power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE) set to place greater emphasis on how effectively assets are managed.


Rising standards for a critical industry


The role of data centres as the economy’s ‘central nervous system’ was formally acknowledged in September 2024, when the UK government designated facilities as critical national infrastructure (CNI). This placed the sector on an equal footing with other CNI designates, such as nuclear, defence, energy, food and water. Data centre operators are now expected to be prepared for a wide range of potential outages and disruptions, including power loss, mechanical breakdowns and cyberattacks. The idea is to make sites more resilient and


10 BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER JULY 2026


responsive to a range of evolving threats, allowing them to recover quickly should an incident occur. Many will already have a maintenance regime in place. Yet, our recent survey of 300 managers working in UK data centres, ran by Censuswide, an independent, MRS-accredited partner, suggests that maintenance maturity isn’t fully aligned with operational need, creating a gap between what facilities require and how assets are currently managed.


In practice, much of the sector is still operating with legacy approaches. Only 26% of respondents said they already had a fully predictive maintenance strategy, while 21% described their approach as reactive and 28% as preventative. Predictive maintenance is often underpinned by condition-based monitoring (CBM), which uses real-time data from critical assets such as pumps, motors and cooling systems to anticipate failures. Fully predictive strategies combine this insight with automated alerts, maintenance scheduling and intelligent spares planning to prevent outages, extend equipment lifespan and improve both energy efficiency and sustainability performance. This highlights a reliance on models that


are likely unable to support modern uptime expectations. The result is a lack of confidence in current practices, with only 53% of those surveyed somewhat confident in their maintenance approach.


Pressure points


Unplanned downtime is another issue, with facilities losing six hours on average over the past year. The scale of disruption is significant: 88% experienced more than three hours of downtime and 52% more than six hours. With tens of billions set to be invested in UK data centres over the coming years, the


potential for predictive maintenance couldn’t be clearer. Our research underlines the benefits of moving beyond scheduled servicing into continuous performance management. Adoption is gradually increasing, but a handful of practical constraints remain. Skills and training are among the main barriers to implementing predictive maintenance, highlighting that capability – or lack thereof – is slowing progress. This is strengthened by broader findings showing the same factors were also considered the greatest operational pressure facing today’s facilities.


Bridging the gap


Fortunately, appetite for change is clear, as almost nine in ten operators (87%) without a predictive strategy intend to adopt one within the next six months, indicating that maintenance maturity will soon align with the sector’s CNI status. To accelerate the adoption of this approach, operators need access to skilled engineers and the right delivery partners. Our research suggests a growing need for support that combines deep expertise, rapid on-site response and robust spares and supply-chain resilience if data centres are to move decisively from scheduled servicing to continuous, performance-driven maintenance. Operators are encouraged to begin with a free


energy audit from a trusted partner like Wilo to find out the potential return on investment and sustainability gains brought about by long-term energy savings and carbon reduction. Wilo can also advise on the optimum time to upgrade assets like pumps and how this can positively impact uptime, preparing facilities for the future. Download https://wilo.com/gb/ en/building-solutions/data-centres/ whitepaper-data-centre-predictive- maintenance/?utm_medium=feature&utm_ source=pr&utm_campaign=bsee


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