30572_Kao Data Critical Careers_Pages - Flipbook - Page 76
Michelle
Wallace
COO, Digital Infrastructure
Ireland and Founder,
A Better Work
What has been your journey into the data centre industry?
y journey didn’t necessarily start in digital
infrastructure as the sector didn’t really exist
when I started my career. I was initially working
in 昀椀nancial services, software and then telecoms. I wanted
to go for a more senior role in marketing communications
and it just so happened to be for a data centre company,
Digital Realty Trust. During the interview, the hiring
manager started explaining the nuts and bolts of data
centres. And I was sitting there thinking, “Wow, this whole
world exists that I’ve never considered before and it’s
actually fascinating!”
M
It was a career game changer for me. The role was just
supposed to be a step up, but it happened at a time
when the world economy was in crisis and one of the only
industries not suffering was data centres. I started to see
how this industry was the invisible back bone to
our society.
76
hese large, unassuming buildings, housing
the compute that runs hospitals, banks,
entertainment, schools, business and more. This
infrastructure was critical to how we live and work every
day. It was eye opening and intriguing. I’d always leaned
towards B2B sectors, but this was different. I found myself
enthralled by the whole data centre scene, which was
something totally off my radar before that.
T
Digital Realty was at a really exciting growth phase then;
they were quite small, around 150 people, but already
had a market cap of about 3 billion, which was insane to
me at the time. During my three and a half years there
it was a lot of intense growth and learning. So yeah, I
literally fell into this industry by chasing a senior role and
ended up being captivated by the complexity and scale
of digital infrastructures.
