After the late-June 2026 temperature records in Europe, Getronics Global CISO Joeri Barbier warns that heat and grid instability increasingly threaten corporate IT and OT infrastructure — a risk still largely absent from continuity planning.
The heat wave in late June 2026 brought new all-time temperature records to Germany on three consecutive days, most recently 41.7 degrees Celsius in Brandenburg. According to Joeri Barbier, Global Chief Information Security Officer at the Dutch IT service provider Getronics, one area regularly escapes public attention: the IT infrastructure that underpins virtually every business process. Getronics advises companies on IT infrastructure, security and business continuity, which gives Barbier’s assessment a degree of professional proximity to the topic.
Heat is not an abstract risk for IT systems, according to Barbier. Servers, storage and network equipment generate substantial waste heat during operation. As ambient temperatures rise, cooling systems must work harder. This creates what Barbier describes as a critical chain: air conditioning units run at their limits, power consumption rises, and when the power grid becomes overloaded or a local outage occurs, both power supply and cooling frequently fail at the same time.
Figures from an industry survey support this assessment: 45 percent of data centers have already been affected by an extreme weather event that threatened ongoing operations, and nearly 9 percent experienced an actual outage as a result.
Barbier also points to a structural link between heat and grid instability: on hot days, electricity demand rises due to air conditioning, while power generation can decline at the same time, for instance because river water levels fall too low to cool power plants. This pushes power grids to their limits. As an example, he cites the blackout in Spain and Portugal in April 2025, which left tens of thousands of people stranded in trains and elevators. The incident, he says, showed how quickly a grid problem can escalate into a widespread standstill.
According to the CISO, the greatest risk does not lie with large, professionally operated data centers that have redundant cooling and backup power. Instead, the bigger risk lies in the many decentralized server rooms of mid-sized companies, repurposed basement spaces and technical rooms without adequate air conditioning, environments that were designed for a climate that no longer exists in this form.
Added to this is the operational technology (OT) layer: manufacturing often relies on older equipment and control systems that were never designed for today’s temperature extremes. Sustained heat increases the risk of failure in these systems, and as IT and OT increasingly converge, a heat-related failure can quickly spread from one domain to the other. This is particularly true in industrial environments, where control systems often remain in use for decades, making short-term adaptation to new temperature conditions difficult.
Barbier recommends four measures for companies: integrating climate risk into emergency and business continuity planning, securing power supply and cooling together, extending monitoring systems to include temperature sensors, and evaluating the option of moving critical systems to professionally operated data centers. A backup power supply that covers servers but not cooling, he notes, only delays a failure by minutes. Real-time energy monitoring has shown, among industrial customers, that consumption can be reduced by around 25 percent.
The issue is also gaining regulatory weight: the EU Critical Entities Resilience (CER) directive explicitly requires climate adaptation measures in resilience plans. The NIS2 directive calls for cross-sector risk management that, according to observers, implicitly includes extreme weather risks. For companies falling under both directives, climate resilience is likely to become part of regulatory compliance obligations in the future, not merely a matter of operational precaution.
Barbier frames this summer’s record heat as a harbinger of things to come: climate projections leave little doubt that such events will become more frequent and more intense. For companies, he says, this means thermal resilience belongs on the same priority list as cybersecurity and data protection.
As heat waves become more frequent, thermal resilience is likely to become a standard part of emergency planning and regulatory reporting, with mid-sized companies’ decentralized server rooms and aging OT systems facing particular exposure.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de