Where does your IT live? Moving beyond server rooms to smarter, greener estates

Public services run on digital infrastructure, but where that infrastructure lives could be the difference between meeting your sustainability goals or missing them.

Could one overlooked room in your building be quietly inflating your costs, carbon footprint and limiting your flexibility?

For many public sector organisations, the answer is yes. Hidden away in repurposed spaces, server rooms are quietly undermining efficiency, sustainability and transformation goals.

At the recent Government Property Strategy Conference, I explored why these rooms matter more than you think, and how addressing them can bring significant savings and sustainability benefits.

Everyday life is digital

From checking emails to streaming Netflix, almost everything we do relies on one thing: data centres. These facilities house the IT that powers our services.

The same is true for public services. Whether you’re accessing your pension, paying tax or relying on emergency support, all of it depends on data centres.

But here’s the key point: not all data centres are created equal. The most efficient data centres cost billions to build and operate. At the other end of the spectrum, we have server rooms, often a spare room or cupboard retrofitted to host IT.

This raises an important question…

Where does the IT powering our public sector services live?

When the Cabinet Office asked this in 2012, the answer was clear: the vast majority sat in thousands of server rooms scattered across the public estate.

The hidden cost of server rooms

Many of us have seen a server room. They come in all shapes and sizes, typically 1 to 20 cabinets, but they share the same problems:

• Inefficient by design: too small to cool efficiently, driving up energy use.
• Limited resiliency: often no backup power, making outages more likely.
• Lack flexibility: fixed capacity, unable to adapt to changing demand.

Think of them like a water leak: you may not see it, but you’ll keep paying for it until you fix it.

Despite progress in estate rationalisation and cloud adoption, server rooms remain stubbornly present. The 2022 Government Greening IT Report found that 35% of IT power consumption still comes from on-premises server rooms; far more than cloud.

The power of PUE (please keep reading!)

Now, I’m about to do something risky: talk about an acronym. Please stick with me. This one matters.

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness. It’s the data centre equivalent of miles per gallon. When you buy a car, you care about fuel economy because it tells you how efficiently you get from A to B. PUE does the same for energy in data centres.

Here’s the kicker:

• The average public sector server room has a PUE of 4.0.
• Crown Hosting operates at 1.15.

That means for every £1 you spend powering IT, a server room spends £3 cooling it. We turn that £3 into 15p. For a single 20kW server room, that’s an extra £235,000 a year, and 26 tonnes of carbon, just to keep the lights on.

So yes, PUE might sound dull, but it’s the difference between waste and efficiency, between red ink and green progress.

Not all data centres are created equal

Data centres have entered the public debate recently, and often in a negative way. The truth is more nuanced. Like homes or cars, some data centres are far more efficient than others. The worst offenders? Server rooms and legacy facilities that were never designed for today’s digital demands.

Modern environments like Crown Hosting are different. They’re engineered for efficiency in both power and water.

One of our 24MW facilities, enough to power 5,000 homes, uses less water annually than three average UK households. That’s based on live operational data, not best-case assumptions.

A smarter alternative

Recognising the challenge, the Cabinet Office created Crown Hosting, designed specifically for the public sector. Today Crown Hosting is the single supplier of GCA RM6262. It offers:

• Efficiency: world-class facilities with ultra-low PUE.
• Flexibility: take as little as one cabinet, scale up or down with one month’s notice.
• Sustainability: up to 99% carbon reduction compared to server rooms.
• Ease of procurement: available through GCA RM6262, with direct award.
• Cloud First alignment: ideal for workloads that can’t move to public cloud, supporting hybrid strategies.
• Future-ready hosting: from legacy systems to high-performance computing (HPC) and AI servers, requiring specialist environments.

In short, Crown Hosting gives you access to billion-pound infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.

The opportunity

Since 2015, Crown Hosting has helped over 300 public sector organisations save:

• £1.5 billion annually
• 33,000 tonnes of carbon each year

And yet, only around 3% of on-premises IT currently sits in Crown Hosting. Thousands of server rooms remain across the public estate.

What could you save?

If you have a server room, chances are you’re overpaying, by as much as £235,000 a year in electricity alone for a single 20kW room. Multiply that across your estate, and the numbers speak for themselves.

And here’s the crucial point: these costs compound over time. Every year you keep a server room, you’re paying again, just like delaying pension contributions means missing out on years of compound growth. The sooner you act, the bigger the savings.

Imagine an estate free from hidden IT costs, aligned with Cloud First, and ready for future workloads like AI and HPC.

Every server room you retire is a step toward a smarter, greener, more cost-effective public estate.

Crown Hosting can help you understand the opportunity, calculate potential savings, and make the change quickly and with minimal risk. Get in touch with us today.

Together, we can build a smarter, greener digital estate for the future.

Michael Ferris
Client Engagement Manager
Crown Hosting Data Centres Ltd