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Today’s manufacturing landscape is incorporating more industrial automation in outdoor environments than ever before. Energy & power, agriculture, and oil & gas processing are just a handful of the industries that require a unique kind of industrial enclosure that is adaptable and reliable, particularly in the face of harsh environmental conditions. While the idea of a bayable outdoor industrial enclosure is appealing, the cost of these solutions has in the past proven to be a challenge for manufacturers. Highly customized configurations, long lead times, and reliability concerns have made bayable outdoor industrial enclosures a non-starter in terms of saving time and money.

The compound annual growth rate of the global colocation market is expected to hover around 14% per year through 2030. This is driven by a couple of key factors, including the continued development and increase of AI computing, and the increasing number of companies that are migrating to colocations to reduce operating costs and increase the ROI on their IT equipment and capabilities. To truly capitalize on renting colocation space as opposed to building and operating a private data center, network engineers need to specify the right infrastructure — servers, enclosures, power distribution units (PDUs), and cooling units — to maximize network productivity and leverage data for meaningful business growth.

The ability to efficiently cool industrial enclosures is key in optimizing the performance of your automation infrastructure, especially in harsh manufacturing environments. But industrial enclosure heating is just as key to increasing the productivity and durability of your manufacturing programs, particularly in deployments where colder temperatures are the norm. Many of the same considerations designers account for with enclosure cooling still apply to specifying the ideal enclosure heaters, including: targeted heating with the appropriate thermal output; energy-efficient operation; and application versatility.