Thanks to the tour, the visitors got a better idea of what data centers are all about. "I had already learned a bit about them, but I’d never seen a data center in real life before," Ola says, IT management student and speaker at last year's She Goes ICT, an annual event organised by DataNews that recognises remarkable women in the ICT sector.
After the visit, everyone was impressed. "I'll never take the internet for granted again!" says Nada. The supervisor, Griet, was also surprised: "This is incredible, I have never seen anything like it. It's a mesh of systems, everything is connected and there’s a solution for everything."
However, data centers still remain a complicated concept: “It’s still difficult to really get your head around the fact that so many different people’s data are stored here,” says Mhwda. Nada: "We all use it, we just aren’t aware of it. We don’t notice it when we’re at home, but we do use it." "All my selfies might be saved here!" says Ola, laughing.