Many organizations fail to acknowledge that the scenario most likely to cause a business disruption is an electrical outage. Without power, everything can grind to a halt.
A sudden loss of electrical power can result from weather, mechanical malfunction, human error or any number of other less common causes (sabotage, solar flares, etc.). Minutes or days may pass before power is restored. What should you do to prepare?
Create a Power Outage Policy
A policy may take the form of “How long will we wait before we let everyone go home?” That’s practical, but not a very effective Business Continuity strategy. Or make dismissal decisions based on time-of-day: if the RTOs (or MAD) for local business processes are greater than the hours remaining in the workday, everyone goes home.
If your facility runs multiple shifts or -most importantly – includes a data center, that’s not an acceptable strategy either. What are your options?
Mitigate the Risk of an Outage
- Generate your own backup power. Standby power generation is effective, but neither cheap nor easily accomplished.
- Redundancy. If you are located in an area with access to two diverse electrical grids, connection to both may be possible (although expensive).
Mitigate the Impact on Assets
Data Center:
- UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). Will fill the gap for a few minutes (or seconds) – depending on the load.
- Hot Site/Warm Site. Restore operations in an alternate site, if your DR plan provides for it. Invoking this alternative is expensive – and not quickly reversible.
- Cloud. An IT Disaster Recovery program to the cloud could help everyone but those workers sitting in the dark.
Critical Business Processes:
- Split-site processing. Distribute critical business processes across multiple sites (in different geographical regions if possible).
- Workload shifting. Cross-train people in other offices to pick up the slack when an office is temporarily disabled. It can work – but not for every process.
- Work-from-home. A viable strategy – if pre-planned. The equipment, connectivity and proper security access must be planned in advance.
- Alternate site. Utilize excess space (or a well-conceived plan to displace non-essential workers).
- Manual Work-around. A temporary measure. Not highly productive – but it beats waiting around for the lights to come back on.
Be prepared when the lights go out, because they will – eventually.
