2 A data centre is ‘a facility composed of networked computers and storage that businesses or other organisations use to organise, process, store and disseminate large amounts of data. A business typically relies heavily upon the applications, services and data contained within a data center, making it a focal point and critical asset for everyday operations’. 9 These facilities can contain network equipment, servers, data storage and back-up facilities, software applications for large companies, and more. Very few businesses (or people) do not rely on them. And determining their location is a crucial decision for those operations running them. In fact, such businesses usually have a set method for choosing data centre location.

Visit the websites of the type of business that run data centres (such as Intel, Cisco or SAP) and devise a set of criteria that could be used to evaluate potential sites.