Power Outages Due to Extreme Weather

What Causes Power Outages

Official sources confirm that nearly four fifths of all power outages result from inclement weather, including severe cold, harsh storms and heat waves. The rest are caused by accidents and equipment breakdown. Annually, power outages imply a $150 million loss of revenue for American businesses mainly due to damage to transmission lines or substations during weather related hazards.

Another constraint involves the country’s century old power grid, a machine of mammoth proportions including 9,200 power units generating more than a million megawatts of electricity that is transmitted across 300,000 miles of cable.

Many of the technologies that depend on this power grid weren’t around when it first came into being some 100 years ago. The rising demands for power supply owing to a burgeoning population, the needs of modern lifestyle and present day technology can’t be met by the less than two percent of annual revenue that the country invests in research and development. Climate change is here to stay which only increases the risk of weather induced damage to the grid that businesses across the country depend on.

Power Outages in Small & Medium Businesses

Power outages can easily disrupt operations in small and medium businesses. Unlike larger corporations, the infrastructure in these boutique firms aren’t redundant enough to withstand the impact of electricity related disruptions – all the more reason for putting together a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan that prevents, responds to and mitigates the effects of these hazards that directly translate into loss of revenue.

The frequency of power outages are constantly on the rise, having quadrupled in the last decade and a half. This article is a primer on the steps your business can take to seamlessly transition these hazards along with a rigorous strategy for protecting your data that in turn safeguards your company’s financials.

How to Minimize Downtime from Power Outages

There are numerous strategies that your business can deploy to stay in business during power outages. The extent to which processes have to be protected depend on how much, or rather, how little downtime is deemed acceptable by your company’s policy. This calls for a BCDR solution that is customized to the nature, scale and complexity of your enterprise’s operations.

The duration of a power outage can range between a few short minutes to days on end, depending on the severity of the cause. While the impact of short term outages is negligible, prolonged power outages – especially those caused by inclement weather – call for a focused framework for recovering from the setback and restoring business.

If the power outage doesn’t span across entire regions, cloud based platforms give employees the option of logging in remotely. Files can be accessed through cloud enabled file sync and share (FSS) services regardless of location or device.

The consequences of power outages can be wide and varied. But electronic devices such as PCs, servers and printers that require a steady stream of electricity can suffer irreversible damage over time if there are too many fluctuations in the power supply.

UPS

Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are good investments that give you the breathing space to properly shut down systems and save data stored on the RAM when there is a power outage. They also protect devices from power surges and erratic supply.

Choosing the right UPS model depends on a number of factors, such as:

• Number of devices to be handled
• Type, specifications and power requirements of these devices

UPS products today come with specialized features such as:

• Automated shutdown
• Customized shutdown procedures
• Power save mode
• Battery life status updates

Pricing depends largely on the combination of the above and other factors that your business requires.

Generators

Only some businesses need to back their operations with a dedicated generator. For instance, brief spells of power outages are bearable for most businesses. Besides, most office spaces provide backup generators that can be utilized. But this might not be sufficient if you are running a restaurant and need to store quantities of perishable goods.

The type of generator you’d need would depend on the cumulative power needs of all equipment multiplied by 1.5 for booting the machines. Generator wattage charts can assist in mapping your business needs to the most feasible type of generator.

Generators can be either portable or standby. Portable generators are less expensive and have limited wattage. They work on gasoline, need to be turned on manually and connected to an electrical sub-panel when there is a power outage. Standby generators are costlier, work on natural gas or propane, are directly connected to a switch in your electrical system and automatically step into action when there is a power outage.

Preventing Data Loss During Power Outages

Protecting data from power outages is simple – a backup copy safely stored at an alternate location that is easily accessible and readily available. Data backups are crucial for any business but each company adopts a different approach depending on how quickly and accurately they need to recover data.

Establishing your company’s recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) can provide clarity on your backup needs. The lower the RPO is the better. Many BCDR solutions allow you to backup data at periodic intervals throughout the day. Production workloads can be run from backup servers or in the cloud while mission critical operations with low RTOs are being restored. This type of backup capability that lets your business function even during a prolonged power outage is a flagship feature of cloud based solutions.

Conclusion

Power outages are a growing concern in today’s business environment causing firms losses in the range of billions of dollars on a yearly basis. The consequences can be a lot more severe in the case of small and medium businesses, especially those who don’t have a BCDR plan.

The solution you choose should focus on reducing downtime, protecting devices from power fluctuations, ensuring proper system shutdowns, providing remote access, taking data copies periodically, assessing the power requirements of your business and investing in a generator, if required.

No matter what your resiliency objectives are, power outages can be effectively handled with proper planning, a careful assessment of your requirements and investing in a solution that meets those requirements.