Business continuity is a proactive plan made to avoid and mitigate risks associated with a disruption of business operations. It details steps to be taken before, during and after an event to maintain the financial viability of an organization.
Power continuity is a critical part of business continuity planning and includes the steps taken to mitigate the impact of disruptions to the power supply. Any interruption that halts the function of computer system, will impact the normal operation of a business and has the potential for larger cost impact through corrupted or lost data, or hardware damage. Longer outages can result in enormous costs through wasted personnel hours, lost sales, inconvenience to customers in addition to lost reputation.
Rebuilding Digital Assets Can Be Nearly Impossible
You’ve already dedicated a lot of time to building your business, and plenty of effort has gone into building your business’ digital assets – like your website. You’ve probably got other digital assets like documents, videos, and audio files stored on your company’s server.
All of these digital assets, including the software you use to organize and make your assets available to your team, are vulnerable to being wiped out during a power failure. To protect your business and eliminate that vulnerability, you need to do some prep work to backup your data and implement basic hardware security measures.
Why is power becoming less reliable?
The demand for electricity is unlikely to reduce for as long as the population continues to grow. This means that each year, greater demands are placed on the energy grid and it is increasingly becoming unable to cope! Sungard Availability Services states that buildings across England and Wales have experienced approximately 4.9 million planned and 96 million unplanned power interruptions over the past 5 years. Time to think about installation of a backup power supply?
What are the costs of power outages to your business?
How will my business potentially be affected? According to National statistics, a single hour of downtime is said to cost a small business an average of £800 and a large commercial organisation £8,500+. The effects of a power outage on a business can include:
Loss of unsaved data on PC
Damage to sensitive it equipment
Missed deadlines
Interrupted production runs
No access to e-commerce websites
Imagine if you had loss of power for a day!
Preparing Is Worth The Time And Money
The amount of time and money it takes to prepare for a potential power failure is fractional compared to the amount of time and money it would take you to rebuild your empire of digital assets from scratch. Digital assets get wiped out all the time during power failures, and not being prepared is like gambling away your business.
Standby Power Strategy
How long could your organisation continue to function without emergency lighting, telephones, computer rooms and servers? How do you identify the needs for either short-term power protection or long-term alternative power source?
Your strategy should cover not just the computer rooms, servers and communications equipment. It should also consider less sensitive equipment that can withstand short breaks in power.
Equipment that needs continuous power should be power via a feed that is protected by an uninterruptible power supply - a UPS, either a rotary UPS or using battery power solutions by Power Control. The UPS power feed, and any other important but not critical equipment should be powered via a standby diesel generator system from Power Control.
Careful infrastructure design by experts is essential. Power Control do installation of all the infrastructure needed for UPS and generator integration.
Evaluating Requirements - How do you determine the continuity and recovery needs of your business?
Evaluating risks that your business could face should a failure of power occur through either electrical instability or total loss of power is vital to ensure all systems are covered with the correct solution.
Classifying Equipment
Different systems require different levels of power protection, with four categories to consider when deciding what power protection your equipment needs.
Critical
Critical systems require both UPS and generator Standby Power. Critical systems are not allowed to fail and in result can have severe consequences. If not indefinitely, they must be kept operational for as long as possible.
Sensitive
Sensitive systems require UPS standby power systems. This protects systems with a ‘clean’ shut down in the event of power fluctuations or a delay in starting up a generator. A Power Control UPS is required to provide the power needed to carry out a smooth shut down.
Essential
This category is for the systems that must be supplied with power in the event of failure, but can withstand a short power interruption. A diesel generator is the most common solution for this category.
Other
Electrical loads are the systems that can be allowed to fail and will not be detrimental to the business if there should be a power loss. These systems may not require any Standby Power.
Maintenance
A good business and Power Control power continuity solution is only as good as the maintenance. Check out Power Control Ltd maintenance services.
Talk to Power Control Ltd for Business Continuity
Whether you are looking for UPS Power Systems or Diesel Generators for emergency power, our engineers design Power Protection systems to suit your requirements. If you demand 100% power continuity then ask the experts at Power Control Ltd. We have an abundance of information on our website and
free technical support, but we can make your job easier if you tell us what you need.