Keeping data centers going in COVID-19 Indonesia

Although the COVID-19 pandemic presented a challenge for staff movement and logistics support, DKSH Indonesia continued to offer timely on-site support for data centers across the country. This helped to ensure that consumers were able to have internet access at home to work and stay connected with their families and friends, while allowing companies, banks, hospitals and government offices to ensure continuity of operations.

In Indonesia, we provide data center solutions and maintenance support services to many sectors including telecommunication services providers and financial institutions. In this case, our partners are an established provider of cloud data center infrastructure services and a global banking institution with operations in Indonesia.

Challenge

As a result of the large-scale social restrictions (LSSR) in place in Indonesia throughout the pandemic, many of our partners experienced increased traffic to their data centers and server facilities. As these are crucial services to allow people to work and connect with others from home, our partners needed to ensure that their facilities were working smoothly.

But technical problems did arise which our engineers needed to quickly fix to keep connectivity running. And with one data center site situated a domestic flight away in Kalimantan island and the bank’s data center on the other side of Jakarta, our engineers had to come up with out-of-the-box solutions to continue providing after-sales services to our customers, which was especially challenging due to movement control regulations and travel restrictions imposed in most parts of the market.

Approach

In the first case, our engineer Gatot Sulistiono overcame huge regulatory challenges to fly more than 740 kilometers to Pontianak city in the Kalimantan island to troubleshoot a problem at one of our customer’s data center facilities that provided network coverage throughout the province of West Kalimantan. He was able to solve the facility’s room temperature problem and restore network connectivity for that region.

Meanwhile, for the bank, our engineers Nanang and Hardiwinata also managed to travel to the location to provide critical support by replacing the damaged capacitors and a fan unit to ensure that the bank’s server room was able to promptly resume operations after it broke down.

Result

As network connectivity and data access were crucial during this difficult period for consumers and businesses, our engineers successfully helped our customers to keep their data centers going and minimize any long-term effects for their users during Indonesia’s implementation of the large-scale social restrictions (LSSR) control.

These cases were also an ongoing learning curve for us to first and foremost always implement the appropriate measures to ensure the safety of our engineers and customers, while maintaining a high level of support and activity in the field.