Dealing with a natural (or unnatural) disaster can have devastating effects on your work and business. There’s one you can prepare for that will give you peace of mind in one major area and that is a power outage. Power outages can be caused by a number of sources, including traffic accidents knocking down utility poles in your area to major storms causing an outage in an entire region.
While this may not seem like a huge threat to your business, know that over the past 15 years, the number of power outages has increased steadily from year to year, now occurring at a rate of six times higher than what they were in 2000—with no sign of decreasing.
The reasons for this are a combination of an aging infrastructure and the sheer growth of our country’s technology and the demands it places on our power grids.
But what to do when the power goes out?
The time to think about that is not then but now. Preparing your business for a power outage is not an area to be overlooked. Not to be a downer, but like death and paying taxes, it’s not a matter of if, but when. Here’s how you can prepare now:
Step 1. Identify critical areas of your business that would be affected, including:
- Utilities such as gas, water, electric, sewer
- Heating and ventilations systems
- Security, alarm systems
- Elevators
- Voice and data communications systems
- Servers and associated cooling systems
- Computer networks
Step 2: Prepare backup plan:
- Have an alternate communication plan in place in the event of a power down so that you can contact key personnel.
- Identify key players in your organization who will be your team on standby should an outage occur—and make sure they know their roles in an emergency.
- Prearrange a plan with backup vendors if and when primary suppliers are unable to meet your needs.
- Ensure onsite backup power source is ready and in working order, checking its status regularly.
- As part of your data recovery, move IT infrastructure to the cloud for accessibility.
There’s power in being prepared for what seems to be the inevitable power outage. The cost of not being prepared could mean the difference between staying functional and being completely cut off—because it only takes one big loss to have a devastating impact on your business. So get your people and plan in place, both inside and outside with key suppliers and offsite data hosting. Then when the lights go out, you’ll be in business. Contact us today for more power IT solutions.
